I was on holiday last week and very enjoyable it was too, apart from the snow on Tuesday. The weather being so foul at the beginning of the week meant that I could stay in, guilt-free, and do some family history. The results of my digging around ended up posing more questions than were answered, but doesn't it always? It's really interesting how so much of this kind of research can now be done from the comfort of home using online tools like Scotland's People or Family Search. I did, however, have to make a trip to the local studies collection in Elgin to photocopy Arradoul Episcopal Church's parish registers for the 1760s and 1770s (there will be a prize at conference for anyone who can pinpoint Arradoul).
In the course of my research last week, I made quite a lot of use of Ancestry which can be good but it can also be dangerous. Many people who post their family trees on Ancestry fail to do the necessary corroboration of facts, rely too heavily on information online, make speculative guesses and then post them as fact which in turn leads lots of others to copy the same mistake into their pedigrees and errors end up as being presented as truths. I encountered a lot of this last week and it often builds the frustration nicely. The internet has revolutionized the way in which genealogists ply their trade now but it is foolish to assume that it can all be done online. I wonder, however, how well our local studies collections are responding to the new generation of online family historians? Local studies is, as many of you know, something I'm very interested in and these unique collections provide us with a really distinctive picture of Scotland. There is a real challenge here for librarians looking after local collections; how do we get the meat of the collections more widely available (and not just for the family tree brigade important though that is). One of my PhD students, Kate Friday, has recently completed her doctoral research looking at "e-genealogy" and how family historians use the sources and also what lessons are to be learned for local studies collection in this virtual family history world. There are some very interesting results from her study about the visibility of our local collections online and the type of content that is available.
I am going to be tackling some of these issues when I speak at Locscot's Spring Seminar on Wednesday, 25th April at AK Bell in Perth. The day is about the future of local studies and, I think, a big part of that is going to be about local studies in an online world. Ironically enough, my own home area of Moray has a very good online tool LIBINDX which indexes a vast array of local sources, including newspapers and gravestones. But, there is plenty more to be done.
So what else did I do during my week off? Well, I had a couple of days in Edinburgh to see the new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse and pretty spectacular it is too, with one corner of the room having drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. And, then, the highlight of my sojourn in the capital was a trip to the zoo to see the pandas. I'd been concerned that we might not see them because of their mating rituals but by Thursday they were back on show. They were adorable and I want one but fear supplies of bamboo in Port Gordon are limited.
This week I'm delighted to be going to the LILAC Conference dinner in Glasgow. It is so good to have such a big, well-know library conference happening here in Scotland. Then next week it is off to Belfast for the CILIP Ireland / LAI Joint Conference at which I'm speaking about professional education now and in the future.
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