Mark Felone wrote:
I hope everyone has had an opportunity to read James' e-mail and respond if
you wished to. If James is to become SC of the VT Project he needs to be
nominated and elected into the position. David Young has agreed to be the
vote counter for the election.
<snip>
I have carefully considered James' proposals regarding our state project.
It's clear that he and I have very differing perspectives on nearly all
issues, but for me two stand out as having a significant impact on how we
work and on how people access our pages and know who we are.
James indicated that he believes we need to establish our own identity as
the Vermont Genealogy Project which is associated with the USGenWeb Project,
and further indicated that changing our name is the place to start. I see
no practical benefit to the proposed name change. In fact, it comes across
as self-serving and perhaps designed solely to thumb our noses at Article I
of the USGenWeb bylaws which reserves VTGenWeb for our use (although it does
not necessarily require that we use it). There has been no discussion or
mention of the impact of such a change on the public who try to access our
pages.
Given the prevailing naming pattern of the other state projects that are
part of, or associated with, or affiliated with the USGenWeb Project, people
will continue to refer to our state project as VTGenWeb while in online
chats, via email discussion lists, workshops, or in libraries and family
history centers. As the highly unique, readily identifiable name "VTGenWeb"
disappears from the text of our web sites, people are left searching for a
generic terms like Vermont and genealogy on internet search engines
attempting to find our sites by sorting out the myriad of hits for all of
the other similar projects and genealogy pages that happen to mention
Vermont.
How we title our pages is not the issue, how we refer to our collective
effort as a project in the text of those pages is the issue. Name
recognition is important, but the proposed name does produce a new identity
as much as it makes us completely anonymous. It is akin to "Sears" changing
its highly recognizable name to something generic like "Department Store
Headquartered in Chicago." If the Vermont CCs feel that because of its
relation to USGenWeb, the VTGenWeb name must be discarded, then we really
should be undertaking a discussion to completely break from that project. I
do not support a name change and would not support dropping our connection
with the national project.
A true identity is only built via recognition for our cooperative efforts in
providing and maintaining highly usable web sites to assist people doing
genealogical research in Vermont. To that end, the state coordinator needs
to be supportive of our efforts as county and town coordinators in
collecting and posting genealogical data on our web sites which brings me to
the other extremely problematic proposal.
James proposed establishing a Vermont Genealogy Project State Archive page
as he previously had done in New Hampshire. This archive page would not
only contain transcriptions and other genealogical information of a
statewide nature, but would also be a repository of locale-specific
information as well. In response to my concern regarding our relationship
to the national project, James indicated that "the original project was an
association of state and county projects with a very limited national level
... the county (or town in New England) pages were to be the most important
level not national." I can agree with this statement, but then cannot
follow the logic that would place genealogical data at yet another
centralized location at the state level rather than directly on county and
town web pages--the most important level.
James indicated that he believes "that research material belongs in a state
archive page which
is part of the state project, controlled and organized by that state and
county coordinators--not run as separate project with no input by the SC or
CC of that state." From my perspective at the bottom, I see little
difference between the state archive project and the USGenWeb Archive
Project. In either case, I have little or nothing to do with the
arrangement and presentation of the material in submitted files. I am unable
to make links between related documents. While documents could have links
directly to our individual sites, archives coordinators at the state level
would probably not be interested in continually maintaining a whole series
of links every time a town or county web page moved. I would not be able to
make specific links in those documents to related pages within my site where
I might discuss that type of record, related transcriptions and other
sources. Should transcription errors be detected, I would have to work
through the SC or state archive coordinator to effect corrections.
Most importantly under the proposal, archive documents are not posted
directly on county and town web sites to become part of the site-specific
keyword indexing that is available. The result is that users coming to our
county and town sites must look in several different places to find all the
pertinent information. As David Young indicated, most searchers go directly
to the local site expecting all pertinent information to be located there.
I can readily envision people bypassing the state archive page with its
local data. I see no benefit to making them look in more than one place.
A central location for archival data was perhaps important in 1996 when free
web space was at a premium, but there are numerous genealogy oriented
servers available providing large amounts of space allowing CCs to directly
post and maintain archival data. The current proposal sets up an
environment with pits CCs against the SC and state archive coordinator in
competition for data within our own state project. True cooperation and
show of trust would be for any locale-specific files received at the state
level to be forwarded directly to the coordinators at the county and local
level for posting.
If the state archive concept were carried to its logical conclusion, all
transcriptions of records would reside in the state archive. Our county and
town pages, and our roles as coordinators would be superfluous. Our pages
might as well be cloned to look alike with a few basic links ala the
Rootsweb county cluster pages. I cannot support the addition of yet another
archive at the state level to compete with my county page.
While I do not expect to fully agree with any state coordinator, I do expect
to have at least some common ground via our purpose in assisting the public
with genealogical research in Vermont. I cannot support these proposals.
Therefore, I must vote "no" on the appointment of James Streeter to the
position of state coordinator. Thanks.
Robert Bremer
bremerr(a)oclc.org