Week in Review

It's been eight months, and I am unsure whether or not I will be returning to doing this regularly.  But below are some noteworthy news stories and blog posts I have read in the past week that deal with my overlapping interests in Genealogy, History, Heritage, and Technology.

Genealogy Research

• The Ancestry Insider addresses the reliability of the Social Security Death Index. 

• Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings addresses Classical and Scientific Genealogy and Tamura Jones of Modern Software Experience has a follow-up guest post on the subject.

• James Tanner at Genealogy's Star begins to address the topic of Evidence and Proof from the perspective of a lawyer, and continues by discussing the difference between probative and non-probative facts in Digging into Evidence.  The connections to genealogy research are clear.

•  Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings discusses new information regarding NARA's search for a host for the 1940 census.  The FedBizOpps page has been updated with a list of interested vendors, and a list of Questions and Answers.

Poetry

•  David Margolick writes in Tablet Magazine about the lost poetry of Warsaw Ghetto poet, Wladyslaw Szlengel. 

•  Generations of Poetry: the eZine for Genealogists concluded three months of publishing, with 54 poems from 42 poets.  They are taking a summer hiatus, but remain open to submissions.

Digital Archives 

• The British Library is collaborating with Google to make 250,000 volumes available.

• The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation blog discusses Demand Side Economics and Digital Preservation.  The future of digital preservation from an economic point of view. 

• NARA is hosting an "I Found it in the National Archives" contest

• Meredith D. at NARAtions announced the addition of Tagging for he National Archives "Online Public Access Prototype" 

Recent uploads to the National Archives Flickr set

• Executive Order 9981 in which President Harry S. Truman bans the segregation of the Armed Forces., 07/26/1948, Page 1/2, Page 2/2

• Harpo Marx telegram to JFK on July 14, 1960

Technoloy/Internet

• Bill LeFurgy at Digital Preservation discusses Linked Open Data: A Beckoning Paradise.

•  ICANN announced that they will begin accepting applications for unlimited new Top Level Domains in January of next year. Currently TLDs include .com, .net, .org, etc  If there is interest from more than one source for a TLD it will be auctioned.  (Do you think Ancestry.com or FamilySearch will bid highest for .genealogy ?  Will anyone bid for the misspelled .geneology ?)  One of the interesting features of this announcement I've noticed, is that they will allow different language sets.  So there could be a TLD using Hebrew or Chinese characters.

•  Dick Eastman reviews  the ABBYY TextGrabber app for iPod/iPad2/iPhones. While the application looks useful, and I may test it out myself, the review is also a great illustration of the weaknesses of Optical Character Recognition (OCR).