No:
63 |
May 2011
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News
May
Seminars
1: Coming to grips with FamilySearch, WEA
Centre Adelaide, 10:00am to 1:00pm
6: Tracing your English ancestors, WEA Centre Adelaide,
6:30 to 9:30pm
8: Heritage Walk—Glenelg, settlement/resort
1:00 to 3:00pm
9: Finding SA families in newspapers, WEA Centre
Adelaide, 8:00pm to 10:00pm
14: Accessing government and private archives,
Unlock
the Past Adelaide Event
15: Heritage Walk—Historic Houghton
1:00 to 3:00pm
22: Heritage Walk—North Adelaide Cathedral
precinct 1:00 to 3:00pm
27: Tracing your Scottish ancestors, WEA Centre
Adelaide, 6:30 to 9:30pm
28: Coming to grips with FamilySearch, WEA
Centre Adelaide, 10:00am to 1:00pm
29: Heritage Walk—Port Adelaide heritage
precinct 1:00 to 3:00pm
All walks hosted by the WEA Centre Adelaide.
June Seminars
None programmed at this time.
See the seminar program
for more details and bookings.
May is history month in SA
History week usually held at the end of each May under the
leadership of HistorySA has been expanded to embrace the
whole month to coincide with 175 celebrations of formal European settlement
in SA. Many organisations are planning activities for the month including
the WEA (see May seminars above) and readers can obtain a
program of events from HistorySA and many other venues.
Adelaide Cemeteries Authority
Since the beginning of April the Adelaide Cemeteries Authority has
had the burial registers for the four cemeteries under its control
online. To search the
registers of West Terrace, Cheltenham, Enfield or Smithfield, Adelaide's
larger cemeteries go to their site (please consider accessing them
via Adelaide
Proformat's site) and click on the logo of the cemetery
of interest.
Obituaries Australia
The National Centre of Biography's new obituaries database
finally has a name, a web design and over 300 obituaries available
online.
The centre sponsored by the ANU has an ongoing program to place obituaries
from newspapers online. In the meantime remember that there is a SA
obit index on the Adelaide Proformat's site.
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In
this issue:
News
May
Seminars
June Seminars
May is history month in SA
Adelaide Cemeteries Authority
Obituaries Australia
Feature article
The role of social media in family history
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Graham Jaunay
Adelaide
Proformat
Glandore SA 5037
Australia
Tel: +61 8 8371 4465
proformat@jaunay.com
Breaking news:
Services
• Research
• Drafting charts
• Locating documents
• Seminar presentations
• Writing & publishing
• SA lookup service
• Ship paintings
Adelaide Proformat uses
The
Genealogist - for UK census, BMD indexes and more online simply because it contains quality data checked by experts.
Proformat News acknowledges the support by
AWE
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The
role of social media in family history
Social
media sites like FaceBook and Twitter are very popular
with the younger generation, but less so with the cohort interested
in their family history. This is partly because of the bad press stories
about some of these sites (clearly ignored by our youth) and the reticence
of more mature people to take on new concepts. In spite of any negativity
you may have heard, business is slowly recognising the potential of
social media and indeed Adelaide Proformat has had a social
media presence for some time.
The dilemma a user faces in using a social networking site when it
comes to privacy and security issues is that the sites most likely
to suffer from these issues are the most popular ones and yet it is
their popularity that makes them the most attractive to family history
researchers because clearly we need the largest possible audience.
There are two major issues users need to be aware of but they are
not unique to social networking. A security issue occurs when a hacker
gains unauthorised access to a site's protected coding or written
language while privacy issues are those involving the unwarranted
access of private information.
It would seem that both types of breaches are often intertwined on
social networks since anyone who breaches a site's security network
opens the door to easy access to private information belonging to
any user. However, in the end the potential harm to an individual
user is related to the level of information the user places on a social
networking site, as well as the amount of information they're willing
to share. Clearly a user with 1000s of ‘friends’
is a lot more likely to be harmed by a breach than someone who uses
the site with minimal ‘friends’ and information.
The problems with social network security and privacy issues can simply
be resolved by users being very careful with what they share.
The bad press and urban myths about the negative aspects of social
media are simply addressed by implementing a few basic personal rules
about how one uses the sites. Do you want to tell the world everything
about yourself, warts and all, or do you want to use such avenues
to glean information to further your research interests? Do you want
to divide your presence on the world stage much as you do in your
personal life and have close friends with whom you share much more
intimate information and other associates who know much less about
you and so on?
Personally I would like to use social media to reflect my life in
that friends are indeed friends and everyone else is there
to provide me with information I seek. Of course you need to select
your friends carefully because some of them may be inclined to share
you with their friends and this is probably the major problem with
social media. I address this by not putting anything on any site that
I would rather not be shared with strangers.
I use social media in basic ways to further my knowledge in family
history. Firstly it is a way of gaining new information. Essentially
this is done by linking into organisations that disseminate such information.
You will quickly find out about new web sites coming online, changes
to existing web sites and news from societies and business in the
field. In a similar way it is an effective way of disseminating your
own information. As I frequently say in family history seminars—finding
the remote members of your family, those 2nd+ cousins is the primary
way of developing your knowledge base because it is likely that sooner
or later you will come across a family branch with new information.
Social networking is a great way of developing this process. Once
you find geographically distant individuals who share your interests
then this media can provide you with cheap and easy ways to communicate
and share knowledge and findings.
Facebook is probably the best known social
networking site and as such is the most popular and therefore probably
the best site to use. The site provides for a range of activities
and varying levels of access so that you can determine who is the
potential audience for the material you post. If you are looking around
the world for persons with similar interests then that aspect of your
material has to be very public and therefore has to be compiled with
care to prevent the material being used to disadvantage anyone. Do
not include private information about any living person including
yourself at the public level. Once you have made a contact, be very
careful that it is a genuine contact before becoming more friendly.
Even if very friendly with a stranger you should still avoid sharing
information about living people, after all both parties should be
more interested in the history of the family and not present day gossip
and personal material!
Twitter is a popular short message-based
site that on first sight seems to lack any potential for researchers.
Its strength lies, not in its capacity to send and receive short,
more often than not rubbish, messages, but in the fact that it is
immensely popular and a great way to locate others with a like interest
and keeping in touch with developments in the hobby. The same caveats
apply to Twitter as they do to Facebook. I certainly
do not use the site to gossip or tell the world what I am doing at
the moment!
When I want to compare web sites, televisions, software or whatever,
I spend some time undertaking personal research before making a choice.
I find that TopTenReviews
is a useful site to help me make my decision. In the case of the reviewed
social network sites, the reviewer examines profile content, security
features, networking features, search capacity, support and friend
focus.The last aspect is of significance as the reviewer reports:
Most social networking sites encourage users to reconnect
with current and past friends, make relationships with friends of
friends and build your personal connections. The more popular sites
discourage users from contacting strangers with unsolicited messages;
however, during our evaluation we found a few sites in which users
encouraged this behavior and over the course of time we were contacted
by strangers all over the world looking to “chat” online
and exchange email addresses. There was an overall creepy feeling
we could not ignore and felt it should be included in our ratings.
The more strangers that contacted us the more their rating went
down in this section.
Ironically the researcher should be seeking strangers, but strangers
who have a like research interest. The very fact they are strangers,
just emphasises the care one needs to take before opening up a dialogue.
Some consider blogs (web logs)
as another form of social networking. Essentially they are news and
information newsletters. The social media aspect in blogs
is that they invite, and indeed thrive on, responses from the readers.
That is where this newsletter differs. While I welcome feedback, there
is no provision in this newsletter for public feedback, that is feedback
that is automatically appended to the blog. Proformat
News has a limited blog version that allows for the
feedback aspect to each newsletter. The best way to manage blogs
is to employ a blog reader which operates like email software.
Probably the major problem facing bloggers is securing an audience!
Apart from having content that will interest readers, strategies
have to be adopted to make the potential audience aware that you are
out there. This can best be achieved by linking to other like blogs,
adding comments to other like blogs, interacting with any reader who
responds, and listing the site on indexes such as Technorati. |
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