Clark Gilbert, President of BYU Pathway Worlwide gave a talk entitled Trapped by the Crowd: When Wisdom Becomes Folly. In his talk, he gave several examples of businesses that failed to innovate when faced with new technological advancements and how that became the downfall of some of them. Western Union failed to realize the potential of the telephone as they continued to develop the telegraph. DEC failed to consider the market for personal computers as the continued to develop their large commercial mainframe computers. He said there are 5 reasons we follow the crowd and fail to innovate: 1) Peer Pressure, 2) Familiarity Failures, 3) Hardened Habits, 4) Everyday Decisions, and 5) Different Performance Criteria. Following any one of these can cause you to miss an opportunity to innovate and move beyond your competition. We fail to innovate because we see it as being something difficult. In order to accept innovation we need to create a context where it is encouraged. Take risks to gain the rewards. As he was speaking I started to think about the things that I do which are outside the box. I sometimes say "I'm not afraid to fail but I need the opportunities and resources in order to try." I have come up with many innovative practices, both in business and in my personal life. Not all of them have been successful. In fact, most of those ideas have not resulted in a completed project that succeeds. But, the process has taught me many lessons and has helped others find paths to success.
Josh Taylor talked about the innovations in family history, starting with the development of microfilm, moving to CD-ROMs, the internet, and now to digitization of records. Other innovations which have helped move the work forward include crowd sourced indexing, consumer DNA kits, and automated hints and matches. He said "The world before shaky leaves was a very shaky world." But what do we still need? We need tools to make family history more accessible. We need technology that assists us in interpreting and understanding records. We need technology that helps us learn. And we need technology to improve our ability to share.
Ancestry presented a new product that is currently in beta called Story Scout. This product uses a few sources to build the story of your ancestor. It starts with a basic matching record then looks for other details to create a narrative of the person within the context of their time and location.
Treasured Inc., talked about how photographs disintegrate, photo albums sit on shelves, knowledge is lost as the older generation passes, and stories are not passed between generations. To counter that, they have developed a fun and immersive interactive archive in a virtual world where you can populate a museum and other buildings with your families photographs and stories. This program allows you to tell stories, create adventures, and share your archived world with your family.
WieWasWie, an archive in the Netherlands, demonstrated their Links Project. This project is able to reconstruct families in the Netherlands from 1811 to 1945 and build up to 3 generation pedigrees by comparing the dates, events, names and ages included in various records. 87% of the marriage records in the archives were able to be used for this project. The resulting pedigrees are rated by quality and a report of errors is provided so the application can continue to improve over time.
FamilySearch talked about the advancements from the first IGI microfiche back in 1975, to the opening of the Record Search Pilot for digital images in 2007, to today where over 4 billion digital images are now available on FamilySearch. Their ongoing imaging work results in an additional 8 to 10 million pages added each week and now the images are able to be added to the FamilySearch collections within 24 hours of being imaged.
Filae talked about their Geo Search function which uses maps to help narrow down search results. Each of the search results is geo-referenced and placed on a map so the user can select records by location more easily.
FindMyPast stated that they had added 1.5 billion new records in 2019. That is a rate of 4 million new names each day. The 1939 Register had about 10 million redacted names when it was originally put online. But now they have researched and found 4 million of those names can now be published due to the person being deceased. They are working on getting the 1921 UK Census ready for publication in 2022 and have increased the number of searchable newspapers with over 36 million pages now available in the British Newspaper Archives collection. This newspaper collection has records beginning in the 1700s. They are combining OCR and community crowd sourcing to make those pages searchable. They have also opened up their Tree to Tree hints with 99% of their family tree owners opting in to make their trees public.
The final company to discuss their innovations was The Time Machine. I discussed this site yesterday and in my RootsTech London blog but I think this is one of the most incredible innovations that has been presented at RootsTech so far. This project is trying to link together millions of records to tell the stories of the inhabitants of various European communities. It links their social networks, historic maps, and other public domain information to build a contextual representation for each person.
As we look at technological advancements we need to remember that we learn by action and experience, and that creating "the Story of You" brings us so much closer to our ancestors. Genealogy becomes family history which is now evolving into family discovery. So, go out and discover your families of yesterday as well as those you have today.
No comments:
Post a Comment