Aliya Sternstein has an article on FCW.com, Open platform preferred for digital archives, about the government taking steps to make sure that future historians, genealogists, researchers, etc., will have access to current and future government and national archives.
Yahoo has updated their translation site - babelfish.yahoo.com. If you need webpages or snippets of text translated, such as historical documents or newspaper articles, you can paste them in (either the URL or the 150 words of text) and it’ll spit out the translated text.
Very handy when working with international records.
Update: From a genealogical perspective, Yahoo inherited Babel Fish from Overture, who bought it with AltaVista. This is the actual, official launch under the Yahoo brand.
In yet another acquisition, MyFamily.com, Inc., has acquired another company to help expand their services. They’ve acquired Encounter Technologies, which came out of the Georgia Institute of Technology Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
According to Google Maps Mania, Google Maps has added street maps for most/all of Europe - good news for those who use the service in their look-ups and what not. Some people are saying that not all parts were updated, although it maybe more of a localization/server issue (i.e. the changes haven’t been pushed out to the servers they are using).
You can read more (as well as the changes) here.
The Genealogue celebrated its 1000th post monday with a listing of many of the genealogy blogs/sites that Chris reads. You should check it out - most, if not all, of the sites he mentioned deserve a place in your bookmarks (I’m not saying that just because RG is mentioned either!).
In George G. Morgan’s “Along Those Lines” column, he has a great article, The Basics of Archival Document Storage that covers something that all of us run into, but that many don’t pay attention to - storing and caring for old documents. If you are like me, you have become the repository for many documents that others didn’t want or care about.
Ancestry.com is reporting that they’ve doubled their newspaper collection to a 1,000 different newspapers with over 16 million pages indexed.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found it slightly difficult to search through there - it’s great if it has the name indexed, but when I have to manually search the newspaper page (it doesn’t really give you exactly where it’s at) it can be tedious.
What’d I’d like is the ability to have the pages in text or Adobe Acrobat/PDF. I have found information (obituaries, etc.), but it would be great if there was a text index to make it easier (and have it matched with an image of the page so that you have it in context.
I want somebody to do an iTunes for newspapers. I would gladly pay a small amount for old newspapers if I could get both text and a good scan of the page, and if it was incredibly easy to find, store (I guess that’s what Clooz is for), and refer back to.
You can read more about it at Ancestry.com.
MacPAF is (I think) nearing a public release. MacPAF if modeled after Personal Ancestral File (PAF) for Mac, and for those who are waiting to upgrade their genealogy software and who are looking for a replacement for PAF for Mac, this might just be the application you are looking for. While there are more mature Mac genealogy applications (and the list has grown to a dozen or so active Mac applications, which really surprised me), and that have more features, MacPAF is more geared towards those used to PAF for Mac.
