FYI.
Tina
_____
Subj: [BOARD-L] Guidelines Committee weekly report for the week ending
March 30, 2002
Date: 3/31/2002 9:10:42 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: merope(a)radix.net
Reply-to: BOARD-L(a)rootsweb.com
To: BOARD-L(a)rootsweb.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Permission to forward as appropriate is granted.
GUIDELINES COMMITTEE WEEKLY REPORT, for the week ending March 30 2002
===
On March 24, the weekly report was submitted to the Project and one
comment was received from a project member. The member is concerned
that wording in the current working document regarding display of the
logo might be misinterpreted by some members. His comment was
forwarded to the Committee for its consideration. Committee members
noted that the placement of the USGW logo on hard-to-find pages is
common, as is the practice of framing pages, providing "gateway" pages
that are linked to from the state page and which in turn link to the
main page for the locality; all of which make defining a "home page"
difficult. The discussion thus far is tending toward not revising the
wording in the working document.
-
Pursuant to an ongoing discussion on Board-L regarding the Election
Committee and its mailing list, the Committee Chair forwarded the
following suggestion by Board member Kathy Heidel: "Why not require
that the CC's and other volunteers be to be subbed to the Regional
lists. This has been an ongoing problem with all USGW P announcements
and such. The Regional lists were set up for this purpose and if
mandatory then the SC's would not have to disseminate this information
to their CC's." This suggestion is open for discussion on March 24.
It is pointed out that the regional lists were not ever intended to be
mandatory nor were they set up for Project announcements; however they
remain an option. Several members note the resistance of many Project
members to be subbed to even one mandatory list, and it is noted that
if this idea were instituted, it could require that some project
members be subbed to as many as four lists. One Committee member
suggested as an alternative that an EC mailing address be subscribed
to each state list with send privileges in order to facilitate
distribution of EC mail. Although generally positively regarded,
there was some concern that it would only work if all 50 states agreed
to it. Discussion on this suggestion is deferred until the SC
guidelines are under discussion.
-
On March 24, the Committee began to discuss the topic of "county
resource page and lookups". The Chair suggested splitting the current
topic into two basic items: "local resources" and "lookups".
"Local"
[meaning county, parish, township, etc. resouces] would include
listing items such as Genealogical and Historical Societies, county
clerks, libraries, etc. As part of this discussion, the Committee
also discussed the disclaimer issue and the copyright issue:
Lookups:
The Committee is in general agreement that the option of providing
"lookups" should be retained and recommended, but not required.
Several members noted that their offer to do lookups is well utilized
by visitors and they would like to retain the recommendation. Some
members commented that lookups generally are limited to providing
information on individual names or summaries of information, but that
LCs willing to do more should not be limited. After some discussion,
the current suggested wording for the Lookup recommendation is as
follows:
"A Lookup is a service provided by a volunteer who will search through
their personal or county resources for basic facts (name, birth date,
birth place, parents, marriage date, spouse, place of marriage, death
date, and place of death, etc.) of a specific person's life needed by
the requestor which are not copyrighted. Since Lookup Volunteers are
very important to online genealogy research, Local Coordinators are
encouraged to provide a webpage listing contact information for
volunteers and the resources they will search. The Local Coordinator
may list themselves in the lookups list, but you are not obligated to
do lookups for the areas you host. If a lookup volunteer wishes to
provide more than public facts, then the lookup volunteer is
responsible for ensuring either that 1) the material is not
copyrighted; 2) if copyrighted, permission has been obtained from the
copyright holder allowing the volunteer to extract and pass on
creative information from the material." <URL for USGenWeb Copyright
Policy>
As part of this discussion, it is also suggested to delete the page
currently online at:
http://www.usgenweb.org/volunteers/querylookup.html and incorporate
the information on it into the revised Guidelines. The Committee
agrees to recommend deletion of this page entirely and to incorporate
the wording currently on it into the main guidelines.
Copyright:
In the context of the lookups discussion, specific concerns about
copyright and the USGenWeb Copyright Policy
<
http://www.usgenweb.org/volunteers/copyright.html> were raised and it
was decided to review that policy and suggest revisions as part of the
Committee's duties. A number of Committee members recommend that
lookups in copyrighted material be limited to non-copyrightable facts
and information that would fall under the "fair use" provision of
copyright law. Cheryl Parker, Cheryl Rothwell, David Samuelsen, and
Richard Howland are asked to review the USGenWeb Copyright policy and
prepare a report for the full committee on suggested revisions.
Disclaimers:
The Committee is currently working on the wording for a general
disclaimer for Local Coordinators to put on their home pages if they
choose to do so. The Committee is currently considering the following
wording for the disclaimer:
"Links to sites that are not part of the USGenWeb Project are provided
for your convenience and do _not_ imply any endorsement of the sites
or their contents by the USGenWeb Project or its members. Neither the
USGenWeb Project nor its members are responsible for the contents of
any "third party" site which you may access from a link on this page."
===
The current version of the working document is posted at:
http://www.radix.net/~merope/lcguide.txt
Please address comments to Teresa Lindquist <merope(a)radix.net>
-Teresa Lindquist
Chair, Guidelines Committee
Representative At Large, USGenWeb Project
merope(a)radix.net