Technology Makes Life Easier & Interesting

It’s amazing how much we depend on technology to make our lives easier. Tools such as PowerPoint make it easy to create great presentations. With just a few tips you can quickly be on your way to creating simple to very dynamic presentations that wow your audience. As mentioned in previous post, mashups and 3rd-party tools on Flickr make your blogging and Flickr experience fun and interesting as well. And thanks to the technology gods for the flash drive. I have my work world in my hand and can move quickly from one computer to the next (office, classroom, home, conference) with little or no muss and fuss. We live in a great time where we can harness technology to do good.

I recently signed up again for a “personal” subscription to Ancestry.com. They have a cool tool called “My Tree” that allows you to create a family tree and as you do so Ancestry automatically starts to search all of it’s databases for records that might match the persons you include in your pedigree. With a few simple clicks you can review these “hints” or sources (census, church, military, all kinds of records), edit the information you wish to add to your family history, and based on this new information you’ve added Ancestry continues to look for more information you might find useful.

One might quickly think that with technology like this, there would be no need for book, document and record collections or the people who work in them. This would not be the case. First this is available to subscribers only and not everyone would be able to afford the price nor always have access to a computer and the Internet to access Ancestry.com. Even though subscribers might use Ancestry to create the pedigree and family history with supporting records available through it’s database, users still need us to evaluate what they find and to offer advice on which record would hold more prominence in proving the facts presente. At this point in time Ancestry.com does not have every record from everyplace in the world in it’s electronic collection. Sometimes those digitized records they do have may not have been scanned properly and are illegible or at best very hard to read. Users will be happy to know that the physcial copies of these are out there in a government agency, archives, or library just waiting for the researcher to find and use them to further their own research and we will be there waiting to assist them in this endeavor.

With that said, technology is great and it makes life easier but in some cases it is not perfect. Human or technological errors such as; poor quality digitization or illegible scans, poor selections in metadata or a lack of some controlled vocabulary can render these resources difficult (if not impossible) to find.  Even something as simple as no power or charging for information that was once free, can disconnect or disassociate the user from the sources they need. Until the technology of the digital world is without any flaws we need to take the more “antiquated” approach of learning research methodology, learning how to evaluate and interpret what we find before we present it to the world as credible, authortative information and/or facts about any topic including our family and our lives.

~ by madmanofght on September 3, 2008.