Saturday, April 24, 2010

A Conversation with David E. Rencher - Part 4

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This is the fourth and last post in a series that transcribes parts of my telephone conversation on 21 April with David E. Rencher, Chief Genealogical Officer for www.FamilySearch.org. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

In the last five minutes of our conversation, I raised a question about GenSeek, the FamilyLink application to digitize the Family History Library Catalog (and other repository and online resources). David is not responsible for that application, and did not know the status of the project.

We talked briefly about the NGS Conference, and David said that I should not miss Jay Verkler's Opening Session presentation about "From the Granite Mountain to the Ends of the World." I noted that there are so many excellent speakers and topics that I'm wondering when I'll have time to sleep, and David's response was "Sleep is overrated." We signed off with my hope that we could meet in person in Salt Lake City next week.

I really enjoyed this conversation with David. Audio-taping it with my Olympus Voice Recorder made the call easier on me - I didn't have to take notes in order to recall what was said.

Transcribing the tape was not easy. We all speak around 80 to 100 words a minute, but I can type only 30 to 40 words a minute and can recall only 10 to 15 seconds of dialogue at a time, so transcribing this was a chore. I tried to capture the essence of what was said using our words, but eliminated the pauses, false starts and some extraneous words (many of them mine!). If I misinterpreted anything David said, it is my error, and I hope that he will contact me with corrections. Also, if he wants to add something to certain comments (extend the record, as they say in Congress), I will be happy to publish them.

David is very communicative and responsive, and speaks in complete sentences (one of my problems - I sometimes don't type in complete sentences!). I am sure that a written response to my questions and comments would have been more succinct, but that wasn't the opportunity here.

I will try to capture more of my thoughts about what David said in another post when I have time to gather my thoughts. I'm looking forward to hearing one of David's talks at NGS next week.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there supposed to be a transcription of the interview here? If so, I don't see it.

Randy Seaver said...

No - I transcribed almost 30 minutes in the first three parts, and summarized the last five minutes in this post. These last fivem inutes were mainly banter and pleasantries that I thought would be better kept private.