Dear «Name»
NZGDB Newsletter #8, February 2008
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graphics, see Newsletter_8.
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This is supposed to
be the holiday season, but even so NZGDB development didn’t slow down, and
there have been some significant changes since December. In this newsletter: -
·
Charging was
introduced – not without a few hiccups, and there still may be further
changes. However essential features of
the subscription logic work, and there are a steady stream of users subscribing
and even some making donations
·
There has been a big jump in
the number of records in the GDB.
There are now just under 2.7 Million entries in the GDB, up from 1.5
million at the beginning of December. I have decided the rule that should apply for the order
of duplicate records.
·
A shipping database
has been added, allowing you to link passenger and GDB records.
·
Future Developments. Should we provide a “Post-it Note”
facility?
Introduction of Subscriptions
Thank you
to everybody who has paid for a subscription to NZGDB, and especially to those
who added a donation, or who didn’t need to pay because they still have
sufficient credits from loading their own records to continue to have full
access for some time yet. The money is
building up to a level where I will soon be able to purchase the professional
time I need to solve some outstanding problems that I can’t solve on my
own. It is fortunate that subscriptions
were introduced over Christmas, when most of us are out enjoying the holidays
with our families rather than working at our computers on our family
histories. The introduction was not
without its glitches: all fixed now, but not without a few urgent program
changes.
I have been
very gratified with the general response to the introduction of subscription
charges. At an annual cost of $25
(less than a CD) feedback has been “Very cheap”, “About right”, “Good value”,
and we are seeing that many users are prepared to support us so that NZGDB can
continue to improve. Why are we getting
this support? Once reason of course is
that, by bringing everybody’s trees together NZGDB makes information available
much more conveniently than before.
Nowhere else can you search for a person, find several records, and then
have the system compare these records for you. Nowhere else can you look up a person’s record and find not only
a tree-linked record structure allowing you to find their ancestors and
descendents, but also linked pictures and documents giving you rich detail
about that person.
But there’s
another reason also. It is obvious from
the way in which some users are using the system that NZGDB is seen as a
valuable repository of their precious family research. You can store a copy of your tree in NZGDB
knowing that forms a secure backup to the records on your own computer. If you add documents and photos, then these
will never be lost, whatever happens to your personal copy and the
originals. Questions like “How much
does it cost to store data in NZGDB?” (the answer is $0), or “How many
documents may I store?” (there is no limit) tell us that this is a valuable service.
As well as
individual subscriptions, group membership is available. Not only does this offer a substantial
discount, but group membership could significantly influence the direction of
future development. Contact me if your
branch or SIG is interested in enrolling all your members in NZGDB.
So if you
haven’t already subscribed or made a donation, please do so. Tell your friends about this site: the more
subscriptions we have, the better we can make it. And if you are a member of a group that could be interested,
discuss with your fellows the idea of joining as a group.
Big
Jump in the Number of GDB Records.
At the start of December we had about 1.5 million people in the GDB. We now have almost 2.7 million: 2,674,308 to be precise. Thank you to everybody who has contributed data to help us reach this number. There is little doubt that we now have the best collection of New Zealand-related data on the net, well ahead of the numbers available in the New Zealand sections of other web sites.
Even as we claim this success, let me say that if NZGDB is viewed as only a large collection of GED databases I will be very disappointed. That alone is useful, but NZGDB can be much more. If people load scrapbook data – photos, documents, even audio files – to make each record the richest possible source of information about the person, and link their trees to other people’s data, then NZGDB will become a truly unique repository. There are already signs that this is starting to happen, with many people besides me loading copies of their precious family photos and records into the system. Not only does this share them with other genealogists, it makes their future preservation more secure. Your own computer can easily fail, or be stolen or destroyed, losing all your precious data. With a copy on NZGDB you have a backup.
Another facility that NZGDB offers is the ability to link your tree with another’s. Of course “soft links”, of which the most common type are duplicates, allows you to link any record with any other record. You can also use the basic family links, linking one of your records to a record belonging to somebody else as a parent, spouse, or child. I don’t know how many people have, like me, replaced some of their ancestry records with somebody else’s. Linking my grandmother’s record to another genealogist’s records of her parents has given me better records than my own. While my own records had given the same basic ancestry (some years ago I had exchanged GED files, and mirk662 was the source of much of my information), by replacing the robertb records with a link to mirk662’s records I now have ancestry records that have been updated, that include many attached photos and documents that I didn’t previously have, and links to records of cousins that were not previously in “my” tree. All this while reducing, not increasing, the amount of duplication in NZGDB.
I dream of a time when the norm is linking,
not copying, and we head towards one record of each person, that record
containing the best information that we collectively know. But there can be no coercion; it must remain
up to individual record owners to make these replacements.
Follow
up to discussion: “How do we display the best record first”.
I think I
have resolved the question of “Which record (of several duplicates) should we
display first?” The criterion must be
very simple; otherwise the GDB search may slow down. The answer: simply count
the number of scrapbook links.
Scrapbook entries, whether photos, documents, copies of certificates, or
anything else, are an indicator that the record is well documented and likely
to be better than another record without these entries. Of course simply counting the entries is
only a crude approximation to “which record is best”. Even so, it is a simple and efficient test, and good enough for
the purpose of deciding which record to display first. Also, it has the virtue of ensuring that the
top record is one that is owned by somebody who cares about it, because
scrapbook entries require explicit action by the owner. Trees that are simply
uploads of GED files have no scrapbook entries.
This has
not been implemented yet.
Shipping Records
Thanks to
Tony Christiansen (user teecee) we acquired data on all voyages to the end of
1845, so we’ve added a shipping database to NZGDB. There are now three new links in the “Resources” section of the
home page: -
1.
Publications. In developing his shipping data teecee had
meticulously recorded the source of his information. Where this was a web site we could link the voyage to the record
in the “useful web sites” table, but we needed a table to record books and
other printed publications that are not available on the web. By developing this as a general facility,
not just something for shipping, this becomes a useful source of information
allowing one to record any publication that other genealogists might find
interesting, as well as the sources of other information
2.
Shipping
– Voyages. This allows you to look up
a voyage, and find information about it – the ship, captain, where/when it
left, where/when it arrived, stopovers, etc. Click the [Passengers] button to
show the passenger list for this voyage.
3.
Shipping
– Passengers. This uses the passenger
page generally, allowing you to find passenger information without first
selecting a voyage. For example, a
search for passengers named “Barnes” from England currently returns records
from four ships. No doubt it will find
more as the shipping database develops.
Why, you
may ask, do we need another source of shipping information? After all, there are already several web
sites where passenger lists can be obtained.
True, but NZGDB’s shipping data has a unique feature: it can link
passenger records to the GDB, so that you can find the family tree of
passengers. Thus the records returned
from a search on “Barnes” include these records of my ancestors: -
Click the link “Open GDB” and you’ll open the records of this passenger in the GDB, allowing you to find their descendents, and their ancestors. Of course there may be duplicate GDB records of this passenger: if several GDB records are linked, then a dialog allows you to choose which to open.
Passenger <-> GDB links are not created
automatically: to create a link you click “link GDB” and follow a search dialog
to find the record that you want in the GDB.
We hope to be able to extend the shipping
database. Can you help?
For discussion:
what rules should we apply to updating Voyage data? Here are three alternatives: -
1.
Each voyage has an owner, the person who creates the
voyage list. Only the owner can update
voyage data, including the passenger list.
If anybody else finds an errors or omissions they contact the record
owner to have it corrected. This is
like the rule applied to a GDB record.
2.
Anybody can update the voyage data, including
passenger list. This is like the rule
applied to the “Useful web sites” table.
3.
Anybody can update the voyage data, but the voyage
owner is notified, and can reverse the change. A log is kept of changes.
This is like the rule that Wikipedia uses.
What do you
think?
What’s next?
The next development period will be largely one of consolidation, with a number of minor problems being fixed and few major developments. In particular I want to spend some time trying to make the site faster, particularly for our overseas users.
One new feature that I’m considering is a “Post-it Note” facility. It is of course fundamental that you can’t change anybody else’s record. But sometimes you have extra information, or you see an error, and when you try to contact the record owner you get no response. What do you do? Currently there is nothing that you can do, except create your own record and link it as a duplicate. But what if you could add a note, just as you can put a post-it note into a borrowed book? Others would see your note, but it would obviously be “unofficial”, not yet part of the agreed facts of this person. If the record owner accepts the note then it becomes part of the permanent record, or it can be rejected in which case it would be deleted.
Is this a good idea, or is this too close to a violation of the fundamental rule “Nobody else can change your records”? I think it’s important that the “Post-it Notes” look obviously different from the owner’s own data. I’m currently thinking of treating them like a kind of scrapbook entry, and they’d probably display with a light yellow background. Do we need to give record owners the ability to say “No Post-it’s”, preventing others from attaching these notes to their records? Let me know what you think.
Regards,
Robert
Barnes,
NZGDB
Developer