Presentation given by Allan Murrin at Botany Bay Family History Society 7 September 2011

This presentation "Moving with Times" is based attendace at The Rootstech Conference in February 2011 in Salt Lake City.

The Rootstech Conference in Salt Lake City Utah USA was held over 3 days with more than 3000 attending. 

• What is RootsTech?

RootsTech is a new conference designed to bring technologists together with genealogists, so they can learn from each other and find solutions to the challenges we face in family history research today. Genealogists and family historians will discover exciting new research tools while technology creators will learn the latest development techniques from industry leaders and pioneers.

The 2nd Rootstech conference has been scheduled for 2012.  2011 conference was organized in eight months.  The talk among many attendees was "imagine what they can do with 12 months to arrange the next conference"

A variety of presentations were provided hourly over the three days with a choice of eight sessions.

Embracing technology the syllabus for all presentation were provided on a CD. 

Five keynote speakers have been posted on the website by clicking on the link five hours of keynote speakers are available.

Rootstech Video some keynote speakers

http://rootstech.familysearch.org/video.php

The traditional family history classes are being replaced by pre-recorded classes.  Some are available free or purchased for a fee.  An added advantage is that they can be viewed more than once.  FamilySearch has over 140 Free Online Classes at https://www.familysearch.org/learn

Webinar is another form of education and are usually viewed at a set time.  A society that holds a webinar can reach a larger audience. The Society of Australian Genealogists are providing a webinar programme  for members only.

You Tube has 35,000 results when you search family history

There are 9 presentations from the NSW State Records and 458 from FamilySearch.

To the User it could be summarized:

Preserve – scan and digitized what you have.  It is no good tucked away in a vertical file

Distribute and Share by sending to family you are safeguard against loss.  The more you share there is the potential of being the recipient of more information.

Give Back Get involved in Indexing and speed up the research process

Embrace Social Media – understand blogging and facebook, learn and use this resource

The Society has challenges

Change the faces of their members and reach out to younger generations

Provide services that will give non members cause to become members

Meet the needs of the current members

Websites should not only reach the public but provide content for member access as a benefit to membership

Look beyond holding day time meetings 

Go electronic with Blogs

Save cost of printing and postage with journals

Reach more with Webinars

At the Dick Eastman “End of Conference Dinner”  I met Jill Ball who of course is another aussie here at the conference.  Jill is also here as a blogger and it would be good for us to consider her for a workshop on Blogging at 2012.

I have copied from Jill’s blog her notes regarding Curt Witcher’s keynote talk on Friday Morning

8:30 am keynote by Curt Witcher from The Allen County Public Library.

There are not enough superlatives to describe Curt's performance. I was once a librarian and was so proud to see a member of that profession give a provoking, polished and passionate presentation. So much of what Curt had to say resonated with me,  I have blogged before that I do genealogy for fun  - for me it is not an academic pursuit. Curt emphasized that a lot of people, like me, do genealogy for fun.

 I typed madly during Curt's talk and will paste some of the notes I took into this post - they may not make a lot of sense out of context but perhaps they will.  Here goes

* These are the Best of times for genealogy.
* We all have a story to tell  - with technology we can tell it better and more often
* The power of telling our story can’t be over emphasized
*Digitized records can touch people where they live, they can be Touchstones to hold onto to help old people remember
* Digitisation makes things available forever and captures pieces of history
* Most technology use in The Allen County Public Library is in the genealogy center
* Technology allows us to move from spending resources finding things to spending resources on evaluating things to help us tell our stories
* Do you want to spend hours finding a document or ten minutes finding lots then hours evaluating what you have found?
* Web2.0 has changed the face of genealogy
* Wikis and crowd sourcing - wow
* Anyone can answer questions and contribute to FamilySearch wiki - some say "how dare people mess with my stuff?"
*  Research proves that the more often a page is edited the greater the accuracy
* Crowd sourcing can help us identify documents
* Libraries all over are digitising
* Making info more accessible - Family History Archive and Internet Archive
* Public domain digitising vs. inter library loan - How about digital interlibrary loans?
* There are Millions of books available at your fingertips that you can search
* Wdytya is  inspiring people to do genealogy
* StoryCorps Newsletter tell your story archived searchable
*Rapid change in technology - Changes the face of genealogy
* If you are interested in more storytelling you will be so happy because you will have more at your fingertips
* Baby boomers are living a generation after retiring and reinventing themselves
* They have a deep concern in history and legacy they will expect technology in their family history life.
* People are connected all the time
* A lot of peeps in genie space hungry to use technology
* Societies don’t have web pages
The Face of Genealogy
* Sophisticated technology users expect to use technology for family history
* You don’t need an ancestor chart - you just need to know how you are looking for
* Genealogy is all about the experience - not about doing it right eg citations
* It’s about fun and success - it's a fact that people engage in things where they will have fun
Success  Enjoyment Experience

* Build our community together so we can develop new and better resources
* Living history is dying help us preserve it.
* Developers - let's have more mashups