Monday, February 2, 2009

A Sneak Peek at GenSeek.com

I posted 10 days ago about What will GenSeek Be? From the advance publicity, I am pretty sure that it will be the Family History Library Catalog 2.0 - with additional links and a user's forum to boot.

Tamura Jones tweeted about it today and said he had an advanced look at GenSeek in an article on his web site, http://www.tamurajones.net/. (NOTE: Users of Internet Explorer won't be able to access the site without a fix, linked to by Tamura; I use Firefox to do access his site.)

Tamura has screen shots of the GenSeek development web site. The screen shots show the Catalog structure - tabs for US, World and Community. The World tab lists many countries. The US tab has all of the states. The user can click on a state and see a list of all of the FHLC entries, and a notation of the available media - book, manuscript, microfilm, microfiche, web site, etc. When you get down to a specific catalog entry, the material is essentially the same as on the FHLC site.

The advantage to this system is that these catalog entries will not be "hidden" in the deep web (as they are now in the FHLC) - they will be available to search engines. For instance, if you Google [chattooga county georgia genealogy], you will get a match for the Chattooga County GA entries in the FHLC and any other web sites and databases with genealogy on them.

The promise of this site is that it will be collaborative - "Not only will everyone be able to add new sources, and improve the descriptions of existing sources, but we will also be linking to the online versions of all the sources as soon as we (or the community) can create the links."

After reading Tamura's tweet this morning, I found the development web site and worked through some of the menus, thinking I could return and do some screen captures this afternoon and show them to my readers tonight. However, the development web site is no longer available to snoopers like me at the former URL. Oh well, we'll just have to wait until it comes on live in less than two months.

I think that GenSeek will be great! Go take a sneak peek at http://www.tamurajones.net/ (just don't use IE).

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