Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks -- January 17 to January 23
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

• ArchivesNext reports Flickr has a sufficiently large queue of organizations that want to join the Commons, that they have had to block new requests to handle the backlog. The Commons is Flickr's photo gallery from libraries and archives of items without any known copyright restrictions.
  

• David at Free Genealogy Tools provides some resources for African American Newspaper Archives
  

• Michael John Neill at RootDig has been noting recently several errors or strangenesses at Google Books. For example, he discovered several journals classified as Juvenile Fiction. This reminded me that Gleanings in Bee Culture, where I've found several articles mentioning my great grandfather, Melvin Van Every, is classified as Juvenile Non-Fiction. (At least they got the non-fiction part correct with that.)
  

• New Uses for Facebook: A traveler found a lost camera on the Greek Island of Mykenos, and decided to use Facebook and the principle of Six Degrees of Separation to find its owner. They were successful (it took two and a half weeks.)
  

• James Tanner at Genealogy's Star has an entry on Challenges of Genealogy for the Disabled. He asks for input. It's a topic I'm attuned to, as I work at an agency that provides services for the disabled. My first thought is that I suspect many websites we find to be great resources in our research aren't as accessible as they should be.
  

• ArchivesFound and ArchivesNext both have entries discussing Preserving the American Historical Record (PAHR), a bill in Congress "to provide federal formula grants to every state for projects that preserve historical records and make them more accessible."
  

• Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings discusses GenLighten - a clearinghouse of lookup providers.
  

• Katrina McQuarrie at Kick-Ass Genealogy has an entry on Why You Should Consider Digital Scrapbooking. However, Sally Jacobs at Practical Archivist reminds us that Presentation is Only the Icing (not the cake).
  

• Jerrie Hurd at Our Stories: The Blog shares the importance of story.
  

• A slightly deranged comic about MicroSD storage media
  

• A slightly more deranged comic about archives. (If you're unfamiliar with the punchline, you will probably not want to look it up.)
  

For other weekly lists visit:

• Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs at Genea-Musings
• Apple's Weekly Rewind at Apple's Tree
• Julie Cahill Tarr's Friday Finds at GenBlog
• Diane Haddad's Genealogy News Corral at Genealogy Insider
• Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak's Genealogical Round Up at Megan's Roots World