GenealogyMedia.com

Today, Apple released Mac OS X Lion ($29.99 store | web­page). The oper­at­ing sys­tem is the sev­enth update in the OS X series (ver­sion 10.7), and it packs some of the most ground­break­ing changes into it.

For the first time in his­to­ry, a wide­ly dis­trib­uted con­sumer, pro­sumer, and enter­prise oper­at­ing sys­tem is not avail­able on portable media. The only offi­cial way to get Lion is to down­load it from the Mac App Store, or buy a new Mac­in­tosh with the OS pre-installed. The OS installer is quite large at 3.49 GB, and will take a while to down­load, even on high-speed con­nec­tions. (Apple is offer­ing to let peo­ple use its high speed wi-fi in its stores, should they be lucky enough to live near one.)

While Lion is tout­ed as being rev­o­lu­tion­ary — and it does in fact feel like a large change — the sys­tem is sol­id, depend­able. For many users, though, there will require some time to get used to some of the user inter­face changes. Instead of scrolling your fin­gers up to go up on the track­pad, you scroll them down to go up. Sim­i­lar­ly, you get to the left by mov­ing your hand to the right. This seems counter-intu­itive, though it is what peo­ple do on the iPhone and iPad. As you start doing it, you might feel like you’ve gone down Alice’s rab­bit hole; if you decide you don’t like it, you can go to Apple > Sys­tem Pref­er­ences > Track­pad (and/or Mouse) and turn off “Scroll direc­tion: nat­ur­al.”

Among the key fea­tures Apple is tout­ing, there are some of note:

• Mul­ti­touch — The oper­at­ing sys­tem sup­ports using ges­tures with sev­er­al fin­gers to per­form com­plex tasks, such as open­ing Mis­sion Con­trol (three fin­gers up) or change full-screen appli­ca­tions (three fin­gers to the right or left).
• Full-Screen Appli­ca­tions — Many Apple appli­ca­tions, and prob­a­bly many appli­ca­tions in the future from oth­er soft­ware devel­op­ers, take advan­tage of a new fea­ture that has the appli­ca­tion take up the whole screen. This is espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful in Apple’s Mail and iPho­to appli­ca­tions.
• Mis­sion Con­trol — This dis­plays all of your active desk­tops, includ­ing the Wid­gets desk­top. It has nev­er been eas­i­er to man­age mul­ti­ple work envi­ron­ments and switch between them. I may actu­al­ly use this, while I found Spaces to be con­fus­ing and dis­ori­ent­ing. It will be easy to have a brows­er open in one desk­top and a geneal­o­gy soft­ware pack­age open in anoth­er, and switch back and forth.
• Launch­pad — All of your installed appli­ca­tions appear on a list that expands infi­nite­ly to the left and right. This clear­ly mir­rors the iPhone and iPad appli­ca­tion nav­i­ga­tion method, and looks to be an eas­i­er way to get to your pro­grams than either the insane­ly small icons in your dock (if you have as many there as I do!) or sim­ply nav­i­gat­ing to the Appli­ca­tions fold­er. You get to Launch­pad either with the Launch­pad icon in the dock, or using a pinch with thumb and three fin­gers.
• Spot­light — One of the true inno­va­tions of Mac OS X, which has only recent­ly had com­pa­ra­ble func­tion­al­i­ty on Win­dows in recent releas­es, is Spot­light, sys­temwide search. The new ver­sion of the OS adds pre­views to the search results, help­ing you see if this item is what you were look­ing for.
• Air­Drop — Sim­ple, no-con­fig­u­ra­tion-required wi-fi file shar­ing. This will be handy if you are work­ing with some­one and just want to give them the cen­sus image for their grand­fa­ther’s house­hold in 1930. This will allow a lot of peo­ple to leave their thumb dri­ves at home.

I am very pleased with Lion. While I can­not agree with Apple’s pre­dictable hyper­bole, it looks to pro­vide a lot of short­cuts to allow me to get from one appli­ca­tion to anoth­er with­out los­ing my place. It’s well worth the $30.

One warn­ing: Pow­er PC appli­ca­tions no longer run with OS X Lion, which drops the Roset­ta tech­nol­o­gy that made these work­able in pre­vi­ous ver­sions. To see what you will be leav­ing behind if you upgrade, log in as the Admin­is­tra­tive user, then type Option-Apple and select Sys­tem Pro­fil­er. Go to Soft­ware > Appli­ca­tions. Any­thing with “Pow­er­PC” or “Clas­sic” (that is, OS 9) will not run in Lion.

Pri­madesk, a new web­site in beta, allows you to man­age your cloud con­tent in Google (GMail, Google Docs, Picasa), Yahoo (Yahoo Mail, Flickr), Drop­box, Box.net, and about twen­ty oth­er ser­vices.

This looks to be a pow­er­ful resource, though it will need to be faster for pow­er users. One of the most pow­er­ful fea­tures promis­es to be the abil­i­ty to move images from one ser­vice to anoth­er. How many of us have per­son­al images scat­tered across mul­ti­ple sites such as Flickr, Pho­to­Buck­et, Snap­fish, Smug­mug, and so on. Now, we will be able to quick­ly migrate images from one site to anoth­er.

This fea­ture is not yet avail­able for pho­tos, but it is for doc­u­ments that you might want to move from Box.net to Drop­box, or from one account to anoth­er.

Pri­madesk allows you to search across mul­ti­ple accounts, back­up mul­ti­ple accounts, and — final­ly! — man­age pro­lif­er­at­ing cloud accounts.

On my wish­list are Ever­note and Office­drop inte­gra­tion. It would be great to be able to man­age what’s in Ever­note, what’s in Box.net, what’s in Drop­box, and so on from one inter­face. Files that I man­age in Ever­note, I might want to share with peo­ple in anoth­er ser­vice; this would be a quick way to do that.

Accounts are free, though the may cost some­thing once it leaves beta. More like­ly, is that the site would fol­low the freemi­um mod­el that has been so suc­cess­ful for Drop­box, Ever­note, and oth­er lead­ers in the field.

Raleigh’s WUNC Radio aired episodes in a series, North Car­oli­na Voic­es: The Civ­il War, dur­ing the mid­dle of June. The series includes pieces on the impact of the war on North Car­olini­ans and their fam­i­lies from the time of the Civ­il War until now. Thank­ful­ly, the episodes are avail­able for stream­ing and down­load­ing from the WUNC web­site.

Among oth­er pieces, there is an episode with inter­views the liv­ing daugh­ters of Con­fed­er­ate vet­er­ans. There is also an inves­ti­ga­tion of the reli­gious his­to­ry of the Civ­il War (“Whose Side is God On?”), which inter­views George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Cho­sen Peo­ples: A Reli­gious His­to­ry of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010) and Regi­nald Hilde­brand, author of The Times Were Strange and Stir­ring: Methodist Preach­ers and the Cri­sis of Eman­ci­pa­tion (Durham: Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1995.

There are two inter­est­ing pieces about African Amer­i­cans in New Bern, North Car­oli­na:

• “Black Sol­diers in the Civ­il War,” which inter­views Richard Reid, author of Free­dom for Them­selves: North Carolina’s Black Sol­diers in the Civ­il War Era (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008).
• “African Amer­i­can Lega­cy in New Bern,” which describes how New Bern func­tioned as a mec­ca for free blacks dur­ing the Civ­il War. This was espe­cial­ly true in the case of James Walk­er Hood, a min­is­ter of the African Methodist Epis­co­pal Zion church.

There is one more day left in Ancesty.com’s free access week­end for the 4th of July. Ances­try is mak­ing appli­ca­tions to the Sons of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion appli­ca­tions, 1889 — 1970. These appli­ca­tions pro­vide detail about the ser­vice the ances­tor is report­ed to have per­formed to advance the cause of the Rev­o­lu­tion. (For SAR mem­ber­ship, as is true for the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, the ances­tor did not have to serve in the mil­i­tary, but could have pro­vid­ed oth­er forms of assis­tance to the cause.)

The appli­ca­tions also include doc­u­men­ta­tion for the descent from the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War-era ances­tor to the appli­cant. While most of the appli­ca­tions are not doc­u­ment­ed in ways that com­ply with mod­ern genealog­i­cal stan­dards, they can still pro­vide a wealth of infor­ma­tion that a patient and thor­ough researcher can use as a start­ing point for ver­i­fi­ca­tion, debunk­ing, and exten­sion.

In my case, my 5th great grand­fa­ther, James Gra­ham (1741 — 1813), seems to have no few­er than 28 appli­ca­tions opened by descen­dants. There will be a fair amount to go through.… I am look­ing for­ward to it.

If you have a fam­i­ly his­to­ry that you want to pub­lish, there are sev­er­al ways you can do this.

Let’s assume for the moment that you want to pub­lish the book in print for­mat, but you don’t want to become a pub­lish­er or main­tain a lot of inven­to­ry. You want to make the book avail­able to fam­i­ly mem­bers, but you are not mak­ing a career change!

A num­ber of print-on-demand ven­dors can help you, but I am just going to list three:

• Cre­ate­Space — An Ama­zon com­pa­ny — will allow you to upload book inte­ri­ors and cov­ers in PDF for­mat. Addi­tion­al­ly, they can design the cov­ers for you. The books get an ISBN, basi­cal­ly for free. You have to pay for the print­ing and ship­ping of a hard­copy proof, so that you can ver­i­fy that what they will pro­duce meets your expec­ta­tions. Once you have approved the proof, the book can be made avail­able on CreateSpace.com, Ama­zon, and even to libraries and phys­i­cal book­stores.
• Cafe­Press — This is one of the first com­pa­nies in the space. They start­ed off with t‑shirts and mugs, and even­tu­al­ly expand­ed to CDs, DVDs, and books. As with Cre­ate­Space, you upload  PDFs of your con­tent and cov­er, and they print books when some­one orders one. The down­side is that the books are only avail­able from Cafe­Press, and do not have an oppor­tu­ni­ty for wider dis­tri­b­u­tion, but the ini­tial cost is low­er, as you are not required to buy a proof if you are con­fi­dent that what you sent will work.
• Lulu — This com­pa­ny is a favorite among geneal­o­gy cir­cles. Book titles are only sal­able through their site, though, as with Cafe­Press, you can order a hand­ful (and a dis­count) to sell. Lulu also ships for free if the order is more than $20. One thing that sets Lulu apart is that if you sell a print book at Lulu, as well as an e‑book (which they dis­trib­ute through Apple’s iBook­store), the e‑book is linked from the list­ing for the paper book.

I rec­om­mend that you get a proof of any print-on-demand title that you cre­ate. While each of these is inter­est­ing, for me, Cre­ate­Space is the most inter­est­ing option, because of the range of dis­tri­b­u­tion options open to me from Cre­ate­Space.

I will post more on this top­ic, as well as on how to turn your fam­i­ly his­to­ry into an e‑book that you can either give away for free or sell.

There is a lot of dis­cus­sion in the geneal­o­gy world about e‑books.

Of course, there are large book dig­i­ti­za­tion projects: Google Books and Inter­net Archive being the two best known. (In 2008, Microsoft can­celled a book dig­i­ti­za­tion project that had scanned more than 750,000 books.) While Google has got­ten into some legal hot water by mak­ing books that are under copy­right avail­able under an agree­ment with the Writ­ers’ Guild, which has not held up in court, the vast major­i­ty of books are in the pub­lic domain.

A great sum­ma­ry of where we are in terms of e‑books is the keynote speech (text and slides | see above for the video) that Brew­ster Kahle, founder of Inter­net Archive gave at the Books in Browsers con­fer­ence in Octo­ber 2010. Kahle talks about the trans­for­ma­tion from a paper book ori­en­ta­tion, through a device ori­en­ta­tion (the Kin­dle, for exam­ple), to a device-inde­pen­dent (brows­er) ori­en­ta­tion. His goal is to make books avail­able to all. He does this via dig­i­tiz­ing books and mak­ing them avail­able as fol­lows:

• Pub­lic Domain — Free — The Inter­net Archive now has over 2.8 mil­lion titles avail­able for free
• Under copy­right (but out of print) — Bor­row
• In Print — Buy

One thing that sets the Inter­net Archive apart from Google Books, is that most of the titles (at least most that I have seen) are avail­able in mul­ti­ple for­mats. There’s PDF, of course, but also .epub (works in the Apple iBooks and Barnes and Noble read­er soft­ware and the Nook and oth­er ded­i­cat­ed read­ers), .mobi (works in the Kin­dle read­er soft­ware, the Kin­dle portable device, and oth­er read­ers), black and white PDFs, HTML, and sev­er­al oth­er for­mats.

E‑books have trans­formed genealog­i­cal research. If you haven’t used one, I encour­age you, the next time you are look­ing for a local his­to­ry, to con­sid­er using Google Books or Inter­net Archive. If the book was pub­lished in the US pri­or to 1923, it should in the pub­lic domain, and you may find it for free on Google Books or the Inter­net Archive now or in the future.

If any­thing, the rush to pro­vide con­tent in the cloud is begin­ning to speed up.

On March 29th, Ama­zon announced its Cloud Dri­ve ser­vice, focus­ing on stor­age of MP3 audio files, which can be streamed from the web with Ama­zon’s Cloud Play­er. Cloud Dri­ve is able to store any dig­i­tal files.

On May 10th, Google released a sim­i­lar prod­uct: Google Music.

The blo­gos­phere is full of spec­u­la­tion about when Apple will release iCloud, it’s much expect­ed, audio stream­ing ser­vice. Many Apple reporters think that iCloud will be rolled out dur­ing the Apple World­wide Devel­op­ers’ Con­fer­ence, start­ing on June 6th.

As the per­for­mance of wire­less net­works increas­es, the cloud becomes more attrac­tive. More and more peo­ple are using portable devices (iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets). These devices often com­bine min­i­mal stor­age with built-in inter­net con­nec­tions, and that adds up to a com­pelling argu­ment for file stor­age in the cloud, with access to any­thing, but min­i­mal local stor­age require­ments.

Apple’s report­ed goal with iCloud is to allow peo­ple to play their songs with­out first hav­ing to upload them. Apple’s ser­vice would repli­cate your list of songs on its servers, and stream them from a com­mon source when you want­ed them. (Both Google and Ama­zon require you to spend hours and hours, or days, upload­ing your music library.)

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in the  geneal­o­gy realm, there is no mas­sive media con­glom­er­ate who owns archival elec­tron­ic records of your data.

Wait … what about Ances­try and Fam­il­y­Search? These folks have archival qual­i­ty dig­i­tal images of orig­i­nal records. When I log into Ances­try, it knows which doc­u­ments I have put in my shoe­box. It has all the meta­da­ta about the 1930 cen­sus record for my father and his fam­i­ly. Yes, I can down­load it, and yes, I can nav­i­gate to it in the con­text of an Ances­try Fam­i­ly Tree, or in the con­text of a soft­ware pack­age where I have attached this image.…

But why can’t I eas­i­ly tag this image with my own per­son­al meta­da­ta (as on Footnote.com), and see the tags oth­er peo­ple use (as on Delicious.com), and why can’t I search my “per­son­al doc­u­ment col­lec­tion” for text (deliv­ered via Opti­cal Char­ac­ter Recog­ni­tion, or in the con­text of a tex­tu­al doc­u­ment) or for meta­da­ta?

Why can’t I search through my entire genealog­i­cal image col­lec­tion, with­out hav­ing it on my local sys­tem, with the search run­ning in the cloud?

Why indeed!

Thomas MacEn­tee did a BlogTalkRa­dio inter­view with Jan Alpert, NGS 2011 Con­fer­ence Chair and Imme­di­ate Past Pres­i­dent of NGS and Julie Miller, CG, NGS 2012 Con­fer­ence Chair and Vice Pres­i­dent of the NGS. This was a rare behind-the-scenes inter­view with two lead­ers who have orga­nized and led con­fer­ences.

It’s a rare look behind the scenes at what goes into choos­ing a con­fer­ence loca­tion, how patron­iz­ing the con­fer­ence hotel and lun­cheon and ban­quet events keeps over­all prices low, and your soci­ety fis­cal­ly healthy.

This is the fourth install­ment of the week­ly FGS MySo­ci­ety talk radio show. It’s a great pro­gram. You should lis­ten. I know that I’m adding it to iTunes to lis­ten in, even when I can­not make it “live.”

Here are some links:

• The FGS page on FGS Radio — http://fgs.org/fgsradio/
• The BlogTalkRa­dio page on the MySo­ci­ety show — http://www.blogtalkradio.com/mysociety
• FGS MySo­ci­ety Pod­cast on iTunes — http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/my-society-blog-talk-radio/id434090469

I have become a fan of two com­pet­ing prod­ucts, Instapa­per and Read it Lat­er.

These appli­ca­tions sit in your brows­er, and allow you to quick­ly archive a web­page for lat­er read­ing. They clean up the web­page, remov­ing ads and com­pli­cat­ed script­ing, so you just have the text you want to read.

You can then read the con­tent in your brows­er at their sites, on a mobile phone, or on a tablet. Instapa­per will also allow you to con­fig­ure con­tent col­lec­tions to show up on your Kin­dle. Both are inte­grat­ed with a great site full of longer arti­cles, longform.org, allow­ing you to quick­ly choose some read­ing before you catch that plane and lose your inter­net con­nec­tion.

In terms of geneal­o­gy, I use these tools to gath­er his­tor­i­cal pieces, such as the arti­cles the New York Times is doing on the sesqui­cen­ten­ni­al of the Civ­il War, “Dis­union,” as well as more top­i­cal items, such as John McPhee’s 1987 New York­er piece about the Army Corps of Engi­neers and its attempts to con­trol the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er, Atchafalaya: The Con­trol of Nature. (That was top­i­cal then, and is top­i­cal now; I found it on longform.org.)

Instapa­per allows you to for­mat the sto­ries for print­ing; Read it Lat­er has a great (and not too expen­sive) iPad app that auto­mat­i­cal­ly cat­e­go­rizes the con­tent. I find Read it Lat­er’s web inter­face to be more attrac­tive, but some of the fea­tures of Instapa­per to be more com­pelling, includ­ing Read­abil­i­ty inte­gra­tion and Kin­dle auto-deliv­ery.

I’m not sure which one of these I will choose yet, but I know I will have a lot of read­ing at hand.…

Anoth­er site to note is Read­abil­i­ty, which is free for sim­ple cleanup of pages you come across, but costs $5 (or more if you decide to make a dona­tion) if you want to save them for lat­er. 70% of the pro­ceeds are pro­vid­ed to the authors and pub­lish­ers of the con­tent.

I attend­ed the 2011 Nation­al Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety Fam­i­ly His­to­ry Con­fer­ence held in Charleston, South Car­oli­na this past week.

I was pleased to have been asked to give three talks: The inau­gur­al Birdie Monk Holsclaw Memo­r­i­al Lec­ture (slides), a lec­ture on Google and search method­olo­gies (slides), and the NGS Gen­Tech Lun­cheon talk (slides), which was on the top­ic of social media.

It was a good con­fer­ence, with more knowl­edge­able and vol­u­ble speak­ers than one could pos­si­bly see. I espe­cial­ly liked Buzzy Jack­son’s gen­er­al ses­sion talk about how she became a geneal­o­gist, and how it’s our job to make our descen­dants think of us as the ones who saved the sto­ries for them. Addi­tion­al­ly, I enjoyed the talk giv­en by Glenn F. McConnell, Pres­i­dent pro tem­pore of the South Car­oli­na State Sen­ate about the his­to­ry, dis­cov­ery, and rais­ing of the H. L. Hun­ley.

I was also pleased that my own talks seem to have been well received.

The next major excur­sion is to the Vir­ginia Genealog­i­cal Soci­ety con­fer­ence next week­end. The sum­mer is sim­ply full of these events.