Over 300 people responded to the survey and at the end of the trial period I sent a copy of the results to all participants that provided an e-mail. I planned on blogging about the results but got discouraged at the time.

Two events have happened this week to get me thinking about this again. The first was a comment on my blog by Bruce. He has a website for his personal family history and wanted to know how to go about setting up the site to do citations like the video demonstrated. It saddened me to tell him that it is not possible to do this yet without cooperation from the desktop genealogy software vendors. The second was a direct message via Twitter from fellow genealogy software innovator, Dean.  He contacted me to say that my blog was mentioned in a discussion today at RootsTech on how to handle sources.

Maybe it is time for me to publish the survey results from 2 years ago.

What type of people responded to the survey? People like you and me.  The majority are non-professional researches (plain Jane/Joe family historians)  many of whom belong to local genealogy societies.  Some have visited courthouses, the National Archives, or the Family History Library, but almost all had done research on the internet in the last week. They used sites like Ancestry, Footnote, and FamilySearch and desktop software like RootsMagic, Legacy, Family Tree Maker, and PAF.  Over 99% thought citing sources was important but 75% thought it was difficult to do it.  Over 90% thought that there should be one standard citation guide and 57% were using “Evidence Explained.” When asked if they were interested in the solution provided in the video, 93% said they were interested.

There are more details and nuggets in the survey results.

Maybe we can explore them more in future posts.

Between the script and the detailed description of the demo, you should be in a good position to answer the survey questions without the need to see the video.

Take the Survey!

Please take a few minutes to complete a survey about citing online genealogy sources.

• Click Here to take survey for individual genealogists or family historians
• Click Here to take survey for companies and organizations that provide genealogy software or services

SCRIPT:

Sooner or later anyone doing genealogy or family history research will meet up with the challenge of source citations. Some will immediately dismiss the topic and move on. Others will find the topic too big of a challenge to even try. Still others will set out with the best of intentions but will get bogged down in the complexity. The numbers that face the learning curve of source citations and conquer its intimidating slope are relatively few.

This has lead many to believe that citing sources is only for the professional genealogist. You may hear them say: “I’m just a personal family historian, no need to cite my sources.” The last time most of us were asked to create a bibliography or cite a source was for a paper we wrote in high school or college.

Researchers at every level should seek for credibility in their research. How else will we be able to separate fact from fiction? Citations are a minimum for our work to be considered as credible. The question is not “do we need to cite sources?” its “how do we make citing sources achievable by all?”

Currently citing sources is just too difficult. In recent years this is getting easier with the creation of genealogy citation guides, quick sheets, and software. But it needs to be even easier still.

There is another problem when it comes to online genealogy database websites like FamilySearch, Ancestry, Footnote, WorldVitalRecords, GenSeek and others. Similar sources on each of these websites have different citation formats or even no citations at all.

The amount of genealogy information currently on the internet is like a swimming pool full and in just a few years that will grow to an ocean full. To avoid adding more confusion to an already confusing situation, there needs to be standardized citations across these genealogy database websites.

In this demonstration I would like to show how easy it can be to cite online sources in your desktop genealogy software. What I am showing is prototype code. I am using RootsMagic 4 because of its support for citation templates from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained. Other desktop genealogy applications that support these templates are: Legacy Family Tree 7 and Family Tree Maker 2009.

First I will create a new database in RootsMagic and will go ahead and close it. Now I will visit a sample genealogy website that contains some information on my ancestor, Worth Tucker. This website represents one of the larger online genealogy database sites mentioned earlier or could be a site containing someone’s personal research. On this site we find information about Worth Tucker’s property ownership in Elmo, Emery County, Utah. There is an extract from the book, A History of Emery County, as well as images of the book’s cover, title page, copyright page, and page 179. Notice also that there is a source citation for the book following a format in Evidence Explained.

Because the website contains the citation and supporting documents, I could use my desktop software to create a person entry for Worth and a fact or event entry for property ownership. I would then create a source and detail entry for the citation and link it to the event. I could also download the images to my computer and associate them to the source. But that is even more complicated than it needs to be.

This website supports a “Quick Cite” feature that allows easy import of the citation and associated files into my desktop genealogy software. When I click the button, the information is downloaded to my computer and the import begins. Since I have other genealogy software installed on my computer, I will be asked to select which program to use. In just a few seconds the information will be imported into my software and when I open my database then I will be able to see all the information properly cited.

Here is my entry for Worth Tucker showing the property fact. This fact has one source following the “Book, Basic format” template from Evidence Explained. The template fields are filled out correctly. Also imported was the source media. Here you find the three images for the source and here the image for the page that was cited. It even imported the extracted text from the source.

Now that is the way that citation of online sources should be done!

Is this a feature that interests you?

The technology to do this exists right now.

What is needed is for us to speak up and let the creators of our genealogy software and the online database websites know that this is a feature that we want. When the genealogy community unites to petition for records preservation and access, numbers count. The same is true when we want solutions to difficult challenges like source citation.

Contact the companies and organizations whose products and services you use. Let them know what you want. Send them a link to this video. Share this with friends and associates via e-mail, social networking sites or blogs.

Another way to participate is to complete a 5-minute survey that describes your level of interest in such a feature. The results will be shared with any individual, organization or company that completes the survey.

She explains the issues clearly and interviews genealogy blogger, Stephen Danko to get his opinion. Lisa also gives the outcome of her interview requests with Ancestry and World Vital Records.

I was excited to hear the interview with Stephen as I have been an admirer of his work for years ever since the Genealogy Guys first mentioned him on their podcast.  Stephen’s genealogy blog is in actuality an online research log where he posts document images, transcriptions and translations from his research. Like all genealogists should do, he cites all sources following Evidence Explained. In fact, I had his website in mind when I created the sample site used in the video. For many months, whenever I visited his blog I would imagine a Download link next to each of his source citations. Stephen is somebody I would love to meet. Maybe NGS 2010 in SLC?

Lisa, thanks for getting the word out.  This is truly a grassroots effort and I cannot do it on my own.  Keep spreading the word and contact the providers of the software and services you use.

Thank you!

For those who want to know more, here are the details.

We will first start with the QuickCheck models found in Evidence Explained. These models can be used by software developers as a feature specification:

This example from page 646 specifies that a basic book citation consists of 7 parts:

1. Author
2. Main Title
3. Sub Title
4. Place of publication
5. Publisher
6. Year
7. Page

It also indicates the format of the citation specifying where to put commas, colons, periods, and parenthesis as well as when text is italicized.

These QuickCheck models as well as other citation formats specified in EE (Evidence Explained) have been coded into Legacy 7, Family Tree Maker 2009, and RootsMagic 4.

Now even though each of these 3 desktop genealogy applications used EE for their spec and received clarification from their outside business analyst, Elizabeth Shown Mills, there are slight variations in the implementation by each. To prove this, here are comparisons of each application and how it deals with a book citation:

RootsMagic 4

Legacy Family Tree 7

Family Tree Maker 2009

Here is a comparison of these three applications showing different interpretations of the EE citation model:

So currently we have 3 applications that support EE and each are slightly different. What is needed is a standard that each can measure up against so as more applications support these citation formats, tests can be created to verify compatibility. Some sort of consortium needs to be created to discuss the current differences and come to a consensus of opinion.

Let’s say that process has already occurred and agreement has been reached. Now a standardized file format can be designed to handle the additional level of detail required for the citation models. In some ways this file format would serve a similar purpose as GEDCOM, but would be updated with the capability of handling more-detailed source citation and referencing media such as images and files.

When visiting a website that supports this new file format, the researcher will encounter a download button or link that references that file:

In the above example, the link references a file called book.cite. The .cite extension represents a file of a specific content type (called a MIME type) identified as: application/cite+xml. The important thing to know about this is that a .cite file can now be uniquely identified from other content types.

We will not discuss the actual structure of the file at this point. Details will be provided in a later post.

When the researcher clicks the link, the web browser (in this case Firefox) prompts us if we would like to save or open the file:

As can be seen from the screen, the file is correctly identified as a CITE file and picks the default application used to open the file, ClickCite Launcher.
Part of the prototype code that I wrote was an application called ClickCite Launcher. Its purpose is to intercept CITE files and pass the file along to an importer application. The ClickCite Launcher application would need to be installed on the researcher’s computer and part of the installation would make a file association between .cite files and ClickCite Launcher. This is how Firefox knows which application to use.

The launcher application and the file association are for a computer running Windows. I am not familiar with Mac computers in this regard, but it would surprise me if a similar capability was not available.

This launcher application is aware of all installed applications that support importing of CITE files and presents the user with a list of desktop genealogy applications:

After an application is picked from the list and Import is clicked, the launcher application would start the importer application and pass it the book.cite file. The launcher application would likely be open source software whereas each desktop application that supported CITE files would provide their own importer. In the video demonstration, the importer for RootsMagic 4 presented no user interface and just updated the database file for the most-recently opened database, test.rmgc. The developers of the importer could choose to show a user interface that might include a list of all previously created databases and allow the user to choose which database would be the target of the import.

The process is depicted in the following diagram:

1. Genealogist clicks download link which causes the browser to download the file onto his/her computer.
2. When the file is manually opened or opened by the browser when the Open option is selected, Windows runs the application associated with the extension. In this case, .cite is associated to the launcher application. The launcher receives the location of the downloaded CITE file.
3. When Import is clicked on the launcher, the importer for the selected genealogy software is started and passed the location of the downloaded CITE file.
4. The importer loads the CITE file and adds information to the application’s database file.

I hope this addresses some of the technical questions that I have been receiving.

Phoenix, AZ – April 20, 2009. Every genealogist and family historian from beginner to professional will at some time confront the issue of source citations. Although great advances have been made in recent years to standardize and simplify citations, it is still too difficult. Today on ThinkGenealogy.com a video was released that proposes a better way to cite online sources.

http://www.thinkgenealogy.com/better-online-citations/

This 7.5 minute video consists of two sections. The first section discusses some of the current issues with citing sources especially when it comes to online sources. The second section demonstrates an approach to quickly and accurately cite online sources. The technology needed to accomplish this exists today. The changes proposed by this video requires collaboration between various providers of genealogy software and services.

As a genealogy community, we have at times united to get our voices heard in such areas as records preservation & access, NARA fees, and other topics of key concern. You are invited to watch the video, provide feedback, and learn how we can work together to make citing online sources approachable to all researchers.

About ThinkGenealogy.com

ThinkGenealogy.com is a blog created in July 2007 to discuss ideas and innovation in genealogy and genealogy software. It was recently recognized by ProGenealogists, Inc. as one of the 25 Most Popular Genealogy Blogs for 2009. To learn more, visit: www.ThinkGenealogy.com

A discussion about modern American genealogy cannot begin without first recognizing Donald Lines Jacobus.

“During his lifetime, Jacobus was widely regarded as the dean of American genealogists, and he is recognized as the founder of the modern school of genealogy in the United States.  On his death, he was described by his colleague Milton Rubincam, as ‘the man who more than any other single individual elevated genealogy to the high degree of scholarship it now occupies.’”  See National Genealogy Hall of Fame.

His many works include Genealogy As Pastime and Profession which was published in 1930.

In 1940, The American Society of Genealogists (ASG) was founded to “elevate the profession of genealogy to the same literary and scientific level enjoyed by history.”

In 1964, The Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) was founded by a few fellows from ASG, members of NGS and others.  The purpose of BCG was to “set scholarship standards for professional genealogists.”

Noel C. Stevenson was a lawyer and genealogist who tried to bring principles of evidence from the field of law to genealogy.  He proposed that genealogists follow the principles of Preponderance of the Evidence, a standard used in civil cases.  For the next two decades, genealogists used the POE although with a higher standard than used in law.

One of Stevenson’s important works was Genealogical Evidence: A Guide to the Standard of Proof Relating to Pedigrees, Ancestry, Heirship and Family History which was published in 1979.

Also in 1979, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills wrote an article for The Genealogical Helper titled, “How to Properly Document Your Research Notes.”  This helped spawn the idea of writing a citation guide specifically for genealogists.  Richard S. Lackey took up the project and published Cite Your Sources in 1980.

In 1997, the BCG dropped the use of POE and adopted the Genealogical Proof Standard. In that same year, Elizabeth Shown Mills published an updated citation guide, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian.  In 2000, the BCG published the GPS in the BCG Standards Manual.

In 2001, Professional Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians was published with Elizabeth Shown Mills as editor.

In 2007, Elizabeth Shown Mills’ work, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, is published – almost 30 years from that first citation article published in The Genealogical Helper.  The first article was 5 pages whereas Evidence Explained contains 885 pages.

I am open to any other suggestions of what to include on this timeline.

.

Previous versions of Legacy allowed for source citations, but not anywhere near this level.  So this improved citaion feature can be considered an incremental innovation.  Evidence Explained (or EE ) is 885 pages and contains around a thousand citation models for U.S. and international documents.  Just reading the book is an accomplishment in itself but then translating that into software? Amazing!

EE was published around August 2007 and Legacy 7 was released in June 2008.  I know that Geoff Rasmussen put in many hours during those months reading and re-reading EE, thinking about it, talking with ESM, translating citation models into software requirements, creating templates, and then testing them. I dare say that Geoff is in an elite class of a few that know this book backwards and forwards. Ken McGinnis and Dave Berdan spent many hours coding SourceWriter and the other Legacy 7 features.

With SourceWriter, a genealogist can more easily find the appropriate template among so many and then fill in the blanks with the needed information.  There is no question of which citation information is needed for the document that you are citing.

Quite possibly because of the innovative work of the Legacy team, other genealogy software applications now support or will soon support EE source templates.  If my 2009 genealogy predictions come true, more and more genealogy applications (desktop and online) will support these templates.  They will become a new standard.  So does that mean that this feature is an incremental change with side effects or a transformational change?

Let me end with a story.  For many years I have thought about EE‘s predecessor, Evidence!, and how it could be implemented in software.  When EE  was published, I got more excited as I saw how the QuickCheck Models could be translated into software requirements.  It would take a lot of effort and time, but the time felt right.  I would catch myself thinking about this over and over, doing preliminary designs in my head.  One day I was driving home from work listening to a DearMYRTLE podcast interview with Geoff.  He was leaking some information about Legacy 7.  When he said something to the effect of “source citation models following Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained” I literally cried out “Nooooo!”  They had beat me to it.

I have since met the Legacy team and consider them as friends.  This is the first time they have heard this story.  They have had no warning about this post and will likely be surprised that they are the winners of the second ThinkGenealogy Innovator award.

Ten years passed between the publication of Evidence Explained and its predecessor, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian.  Even with the passing of a decade, I consider Evidence Explained an incremental innovation that has caused some beneficial side effects. 

Incremental Innovation

Whereas Evidence! simply gave citation examples for primary, subsequent, and bibliographic entries, Evidence Explained gives citation examples, explanation of record types, and QuickCheck Models:

Each QuickCheck Model shows a sample citation that is annotated with descriptions of what type of information goes where in the citation.  The model shown above is for a digital image of a census record on an online commercial web site (see EE, page 240).  The parts of a citation are identified as Census ID, Jurisdiction, Schedule, Civil Division, Page ID, Household ID, etc.  The model looks like a form that was then filled in with a citation.  The innovation of the QuickCheck Model for citations makes it easier to understand the citation format and apply it to your own sources.

Side Effects

A side effect of this innovation is that now citation models following Evidence Explained are showing up in genealogy software.  The format of the QuickCheck Model also makes it easy for developers to code the templates into their software.  Two examples are Legacy 7 and RootsMagic 4.  It is likely that this trend will continue as it has already been announced as an upcoming feature of Family Tree Maker 2009.  As more and more software applications include citation models from Evidence Explained, it will become a standard and one day be as commonplace as GEDCOM is today. 

Watch out for online database sites such as Ancestry, FamilySearch, Footnote, and WorldVitalRecords to see which is the first to follow Evidence Explained.  Whether or not QuickCheck Models were created with software developers in mind, it is apparent that this incremental innovation is having some real side effects.

To learn how to make a ThinkGenealogy Innovator Award nomination, check out the Innovator Awards page.

One point that I brought up in today’s visit that is an issue with not just Footnote, but also FamilySearch, Ancestry, World Vital Records, and other online database/document sites is that there is a lack of consistency with source citations.  For example, the same census document could have different citations on different sites and none of the citations follow the format in either of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ works: Evidence! or Evidence Explained.  When I download an image from one of these sites, I should get automatic source citation in my desktop genealogy application as well as additional details such as source provenance.  It should be very easy.  To modify a phrase from an action movie: “With great source repositories, comes great responsibility.”

 It is very encouraging to see companies like Footnote take an interest in what its members and potential members care about.  I was impressed by the Footnote team and site and get the feeling that the innovation hasn’t stopped yet.

As an added bonus, I got to meet Dick Eastman.  Overall, what a great experience!

I like the fact the WorldVitalRecords geocodes all records added to their site.  Why you are at it, why don’t you add source citations in metadata/xml form following the conventions in Elizabeth Shown Mills book, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace? 

Currently source citation is hard.  When it is available, it is in text format that must be copied and pasted into your genealogy program.  But source citation is vital so that proper evaluation of evidence can be done and so that constant re-examination of the same records can be avoided.  If when you click on a document to download the image, the link was instead something like an rss link that has metadata with it (think rss enclosure tag) and if that xml format were a standard then genealogy software could read the information, add the image to the application, and add the proper source citation.  What could be easier for a user than every time a document image is downloaded from an online database, the source was automatically cited?  The software developers would be half way there as they would then just need to add a way to manually add the same information for offline sources. 

The first analysis that needs to be done with a source is to determine if it is original or derivative.  The metadata could include this information already.  The next step would be to have the metadata for derivative sources include the source provenance all the way back to the original.  Who would be in a better position to know that than the site owner who negotiated with the owner of the source content?  This identification would then only have to be done once correctly and it would save many family historians/genealogists from doing the same work and sometimes incorrectly. 

Now the metadata would also be available to search engines and special source searches could be created to find and aggregate the information.  Think about what Google, Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook or others could do with this type of information.

1. Creating a source citation metadata standard. 
2. Being the first records site to metadata source cite all their content. 
3. Making it extremely easy to cite online sources. 
4. Creating a whole new way to search for records. 

Now talk about jumping curves!

Some of these ideas I have shared before in Expanded Vision of Genealogy 2.0.

Happy curve jumping.

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 has been around since 2004 and is defined by wikipedia as the:

“perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users”

There is much debate over the definition of Web 2.0 and what makes a website “Web 2.0″.  According to SEOmoz.org, some of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

• User generated and/or user influenced content
• Applications that use the Web (versus the desktop) as a platform, in innovative ways
• Similar visual design and shared functional languages
• Leveraging of popular trends, including blogging, social tagging, wikis, and peer-to-peer sharing
• Inclusion of emerging web technologies like RSS, AJAX, APIs (and accompanying mashups), Ruby on Rails and others
• Open source or sharable/editable frameworks in the form of user-oriented “create your own” APIs

Web 2.0 links:

• O’Reilly Radar - Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again
• SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards
• WebTrends 2.0 - Web 2.0 Directory
• Pixel Acres - The Visual Design of Web 2.0
• Web Design from Scratch - Current Style in Web Design

Sample Sites:

• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• LinkedIn
• Wikipedia

Genealogy 2.0

When I search the internet for “genealogy 2.0″, I get a number of sites that talk about the application of Web 2.0 to genealogy.  These sites mention social networking and collaboration as key components of Genealogy 2.0.  One blog, The Plog: Pytlewski Log, states:

“traditionally genealogy 2.0 has only referred to the new internet based applications that are changing the way we collaborate as a genealogical community”

My view of Genealogy 2.0 is broader than Web 2.0 genealogy application or what I term, Web 2.0+Gen.  Maybe it is because I have developed both web applications and Windows client applications.  Maybe it is because I see so many areas for improvement and innovation in genealogy software and I don’t want to wait around for Genealogy 2.5 or 3.0.  Or maybe it is just the developer in me that wants to avoid tight coupling. But pairing Genealogy 2.0 with Web 2.0 excludes genealogy software that is not web-based.  It also seems to focus too much on what Web 2.0 is and not what Genealogy 2.0 could be.

Genealogy 2.0 links:

• Genealogy 2.0
• Family Matters

Sample Sites:

• FamilyLink
• Geni
• FamilyPursuit

Expanded View of Genealogy 2.0

Many of these ideas are not new, but have been in the genealogy community for years.  The time is ripe for them to materialize as software that will aid genealogists and family historians to do things that they have never been able to easily do before. 

An expanded view of Genealogy 2.0 includes the following characteristics:

• Social networking 
• Collaboration during research, analysis, and conclusions
• More than just sharing data and results
• Supports sources, information, evidence, and conclusions
• Document-centered data collection
• Standardized source citation (see Evidence Explained)
• Source citation as data not text
• Source provenance
• Information extraction
• Evidence evaluation and weight
• Conclusion recording
• Online data backup
• Community of researchers
• Online data storage or peer-to-peer offline storage
• Data linking and layering, not merging
• Expanded to include not only web-based applications but also desktop and mobile
• Modernizing of GEDCOM or replacement with XML-based format
• The ability to not do anything with genealogy for a year and then start right where I left off without any loss of information or momentum

Now the last point may just be my own personal wish list item, but if  a Genealogy 2.0 application included a place to put everthing and kept track of what I have done and what else needs to be done then it would be much easier to continue where I left off.

Genealogy 2.0 Expanded links:

• Source-Centricity
• Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills
• The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual

I look forward to your comments and ideas about Genealogy 2.0.

The book can be purchased from Genealogical Publishing Company.