Marty and all,
The lack of cooperation you speak of has been going on in genealogical
circles long before the Internet. Our neighboring county of Alexander,
small as it is, has two genealogical societies that have initiated legal
action against one another over the years. My county of Catawba has a
genealogical society that has shown disdain for the Catawba NCGenWeb site
and has, at one time, threatened to sue me.
I can't offer any solutions on how to get related entities to cooperate. If
another site wants to provide the same information I have, power to 'em.
I'll be happy to link them. I am the NCGenWeb page owner for Catawba County
and I don't intend to become a sponsor for other groups--at least not on my
NCGenWeb page.
FWIW
--Derick S. Hartshorn
At 10:02 AM 10/4/01, Marty wrote:
Elizabeth,
Your points are well taken. I'd like to clarify, though, what I meant about
the risk of duplicating efforts. There's at least one county in NC that I
know of in which there are two separate genealogy sites. One is sponsored
by NCGenWeb and the other is sponsored by that county's local family
research society. Each site is very well done. But neither site refers to
or provides a link to the other. I don't know why this is, but it indicates
to me that there's little, if any, cooperation between these two sites which
focus on the same county. A further indication of lack of
communication/cooperation is the fact that both sites contain census
information for some of the exact same census years, but transcribed by
different people for each site. This is the kind of duplication of efforts
I was referring to. Had these folks been communicating/cooperating with
each other, then some of the individuals who were engaged in the hard work
of transcribing census records could have been working on a project that
wasn't already being done by someone else.
I agree with you that a single site for each county, sponsored by either one
or multiple organizations, is not an appropriate solution to this problem.
You're right that no one person or group should have what could potentially
amount to a sort of monopoly on information and projects for one county.
So on the one hand, there's the problem of more than one group working on
the same county but making little or no effort to cooperate, and on the
other hand there's the problem of one individual or group dominating one
county and possibly "locking up" projects. I think they're both valid
concerns.
But getting back to the more specific question of muliple sponsorships--I
haven't looked at all of the county pages, but the ones I have seen which
include icons for other genealogy-related sites on the internet seem to me
to be providing their users with links to other sites with useful
information. This seems to me to be done in the spirit of cooperation, and
with the intent of helping a greater number of people find the information
they're looking for. Isn't that what USGenWeb and NCGenWeb are about?
Marty
marty(a)ec.rr.com