Thursday, August 2, 2007

Footnote.com Partners with Allen County Public Library

www.Footnote.com announced today that they will partner with Allen County Public Library (ACPL) in Fort Wayne, Indiana to provide digital access to millions of historical records held by the largest U.S. public genealogy library.

The full press release can be found at Leland Meitzler's Genealogy Blog and the DearMYRTLE Blog - these were the first two notices that I saw, there may be others.

I am confused as to why the press release is not available on Footnote's Press Room or the Footnote Blog site (as of 2 August 2007 before 10 PM).

I was curious as to what databases at ACPL might be offered on Footnote. The text says:

"This exciting partnership will result in millions of historical records being digitized and made available online for the first time at Footnote.com. The ACPL collections feature unique American and International records including family histories, city directories, military records and historical newspapers."

I am disappointed, but not surprised, that the list doesn't include the ACPL's collection of genealogy newsletters, periodicals, journals and magazines. ACPL houses a complete collection of the genealogy-related publications that are indexed in the PERiodical Source Index (PERSI). I'm not surprised because I've been told that the copyright on many publications are held by the authors or the publication's owner, and therefore the publications cannot be digitized.

Does anybody know if the ACPL databases will be available on www.Footnote.com accessed at the LDS Family History Centers (when those links come alive in the future)?

The good news is that the ACPL collection of family histories, and the ACPL collection of City Directories and Historic Newspapers may contain many more volumes and issues than have been digitized and are available on other web sites.

It will be fun to see what exciting new content will be available on www.Footnote.com. I do note that there is never any date certain for availability of online databases - we just have to wait for the announcements.

2 comments:

Becky Wiseman said...

Randy, I too was curious about this and am wondering exactly what will be available digitally. One of the other things I'm curious about with the Allen County Public Library is their association with WeRelate.org and what that really means.

Yoav said...

Randy,

I would consider posting a link to www.famillion.com
It's a great new website which I believe to be unique and better than all genealogy and family trees related sites on the web.The site connects different people around the world, by using a unique algorithm that identifies genealogical matches and notifies users once there is an overlap between family trees. Their goal is to gather as many people as possible, and connect the entire world through family ties. You can read more about it at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070730/ukm019.html?.v=75

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/41744e4c-ea24-11db-91c7-000b5df10621.html

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-oKr4rtE_dLIPJ.64cW8g7t4-?cq=1&p=70
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,148619.shtml

http://mashable.com/2007/07/30/famillion

Best reagrds,

Yoav.