Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Project Management at LiveRoots.com - Post 1

I am deeply involved in a number of my own research projects, and often work on projects for friends and society colleagues. I need a good genealogy research project management system. I have Bill Dollarhide's book Managing a Genealogical Research Project book hiding in my stacks...and haven't read it for years.

In all of the hubbub about the SCGS Jamboree in June, I missed the LiveRoots press release about Live Roots Search Experience, Release Two which highlighted the new Project Management features at http://www.liveroots.com/.

I met Illya D'Addezio at the Jamboree and enjoyed our conversations. I was embarrassed that I had not heard of his project management system, but I promised to try it out. I did that three weeks ago, got busy on other things, and today revisited my work. I thought I would share my findings and thoughts with my readers:

First, please go to http://www.liveroots.com/ and read the About page. You need to sign up for a Team Roots account, which is free for a basic account. I did.

After I signed in to my account, this screen appeared:


In order to use the Project Management system, I clicked on the "Manage" link. An introductory page gave some preliminary information:



There was a link to the Managing your Genealogical Projects at Live Roots page which is shown below:



This page provides a good summary of all of the features of the Project Management system. I decided to start a new project so I clicked on the "Click here to get started" link, and was in the "Research Project Editor." I entered a name for my research project, decided to keep it Private for now, and then was ready to start:



On the screen above, I clicked on the "Manage" link and saw my "Research Project" page:



I decided to do a Search for my Lanphear/Lanfear surname, so I clicked on "Search" and entered "Lanphear" In the Keyword or Surname Search field:



The results are provided in groups - Subscription Data (in GenealogyToday results), Resource Results (from other onlnie resources) and Project Results (if anybody else is working this surname):


The Subscription Data search shows quite a few matches, so I clicked on the "Lanphear Surname" link and received this list of databases on www.GenealogyToday.com containing the name:



Back on the Search Results screen, I clicked on the first entry in the Resource Results list and saw:



This provides a link to the book on http://www.ancestry.com/. If I had a subscription to Ancestry, I could click on the link and review the book.

I have only started my Project Management work. In the next post, I'll go a bit further with the system.

Are any readers familiar with any other online Project Management system that might be useful to genealogy researchers?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Randy,
Why not get the subscription? It is only $33/year. I found much more information that is reserved for subscribers.
Happy Dae·
http://ShoestringGenealogy.com

September said...

Thanks, Randy! This looks like it could be a great help!