Thursday, March 13, 2008

I love conference syllabi

Even though I want to attend the regional and national conferences held each year, I have succeeded in attending only one NGS conference (1995 in San Diego) and the four Family History Fair's in Escondido (in San Diego County) in 2004-2007. I have high hopes to attend the FGS Conference in Philadelphia this year, and I will attend the SCGS Jamboree in June in Burbank, and we're thinking about taking a genealogy cruise.

The next best thing to attending the conference is to obtain the syllabus for the conference with the speaker handouts all in one publication. I've purchased several of these in book form over the past years, but was disappointed when the 2007 NGS and FGS conference syllabi were not offered for sale to non-attendees.

DearMYRTLE told us that the syllabus for the St. George (Utah) Genealogy and Family Heritage Jamboree for 2007 and earlier were available. The www.MyAncestorsFound.com web site has them for sale for $9.95 for CDROM and $18.00 for book form. There are other syllabi there also. The 2008 syllabi are not yet available.

The CDROMs came the other day and I spent an enjoyable two hours reading them "cover to cover." There is so much useful information in these syllabi. I made a list of web sites, and printed off several helpful articles and pages for my own use.

Conference syllabi like these are excellent bargains for genealogy education - whether a beginner or an experienced researcher.

I hope that other regional and national conferences will put the syllabus for their event on CDROMs and offer them for sale for a nominal fee. They are an excellent method to recover some of the costs of the event and educate researchers who cannot attend the conference.

By the way - what is the correct plural of syllabus? Answer.com says that it is either Syllabi or Syllabuses... and Wikipedia.com says that it is Syllabi, Syllabus or Syllabuses depending on declension (huh?). I do like syllabi!

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