ThinkGenealogy

In December 2008, I wrote a blog post titled 9 Genealogy Predictions for 2009.  It is now time to review that list and see how well the predictions matched reality.

1.  Two more desktop genealogy applications will support source citation templates from Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained. Currently Legacy 7 and RootsMagic 4 support this. The other two might likely be Family Tree Maker and The Master Genealogist.

Family Tree Maker 2009 now supports source citation templates following Evidence Explained.  To my knowledge, no other desktop genealogy applications have announced this support.

2.  One major online database (Ancestry, WorldVitalRecords, FamilySearch, Footnote) will announce upcoming support for Evidence Explained source citations.  Other sites will soon follow with their own announcements.

I am disappointed that none of the mentioned online databases support Evidence Explained source citations.  Please correct me if I am mistaken.  If GenSeek is released in 2010, maybe it will be the first.

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In gotcha #1 we looked at the issue of having the Source quality associated with the Source Details instead of the Master Source.  In gotcha #2 we look at issues dealing with evidence.

Source, Information, & Evidence

According to Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, ”sources are artifacts, books, digital files, documents, film, people, photographs, recordings, websites, etc.” (see page 24)  Information is the content of the source.  Evidence “represents our interpretation of information we consider relevant to the research question or problem.” (see page 25)  So in order to classify evidence we need both information and a research objective.  Even though the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) does not include a step to define research goals, I’ve included it as part of the Genealogy Research Process Map because it is implied.  Step one of the GPS states:

“We conduct a reasonable exhaustive search in reliable sources for all information that is or may be pertinent to the identity, relationship, event, or situation in question.”
The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual, page 1.

How do we know which sources to search if we don’t have a research objective?  The definitions of direct and indirect evidence also points to the need to have a defined research objective:

Direct evidence – relevant information that seems to answer the research question or solve the problem all by itself.
Indirect evidence – relevant information that cannot, alone, answer the question;
Negative evidence – an inference we can draw from the absence of information that should exist under particular circumstances.
Evidence Explained, page 25

Even the definition for negative evidence hints at a research objective.

So how can we set the citation quality value for evidence in RootsMagic or any other genealogy software unless we have a research objective?

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I applaud the work the RootsMagic team has done to bring professional-quality research practices to the most recent version of RootsMagic. The work that they (and others) are doing is truly innovative. Just the other day, I awarded RootsMagic 4 an Innovator award for the implementation of research analysis around their citation quality feature.

I strongly encourage users of RootsMagic to use this feature, but in its current implementation there are a few gotchas and workarounds that need to be followed.

The Genealogical Proof Standard & Evidence Explained define research analysis classifications for a source, information, and evidence. A source is an object (or person) that contains (or has) information. A source can be classified as original or derivative. An original source is in its first oral or recorded form. Everything else that comes from an original (or another derivative) is a derivative. For example, a book is an original. Let’s say that it is a census enumerator’s book that he carried from house to house to take the census. Now let’s say that book is microfilmed and stored at an archive. The microfilm copy is a derivative. The digitization of the microfilm is a second generation derivative of the original. Without getting into the special cases of image copies, duplicate originals, and record copies, it is relatively easy to start uncovering the provenance or ancestry of the source you are using for your research back to the original source. The classification of a source as original or derivative helps to answer the question “Is there a better source?” and helps in your analysis as original sources usually carry more weight than derivative.

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Writing about this next innovation has been on my backlog for many months (at least 3). In a previous innovator award, I spotlighted one of the first genealogy software packages to support source citation templates following those found in Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills.  These templates help the beginning and professional genealogist to accurately cite sources as part of their effort to do professional-quality work.

As early as the 1997 book, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian, Elizabeth Shown Mills has covered the topics of citation and analysis.  It is this second item, analysis, that is the focus of this innovator award. In Evidence! we start to see the formation of the current classification for sources (as original or derivative) and evidence (as direct or indirect).  The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual published in 2000 supports the classification of sources (as original or derivative), adds a classification for information (as primary or secondary), and continues the classification of evidence (as direct or indirect).  These classifications remained unchanged in Professional Genealogy which was published in 2001.  By 2006 as seen on quick sheet, Evidence Analysis: A Research Process Map by Elizabeth Shown Mills we see the formation of a new evidence classification so in addition to direct or indirect we can classify evidence as negative evidence.  When Evidence Explained was published in 2007 it restated these same classifications for sources (original or derivative), information (primary or secondary), and evidence (direct, indirect, or negative).

The winner of the next innovator award not only supports Evidence Explained citation templates but has coded these professional analysis practices into their software in a way that is approachable to all.  So a big congratulations goes out to Bruce Buzbee and his RootsMagic team!

Let’s look at the implementation in more detail.

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In this post, we continue our exploration through existing bibliographic standards to see how they might work as a format for online sites to easily share citation information.  To see the journey we have made so far, visit the page, A Better Way to Cite Online Sources.

From the Library of Congress standards page for MODS, we see the following description:

Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is a schema for a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, and particularly for library applications.

On the MODS overview page, we get more details:

As an XML schema it is intended to be able to carry selected data from existing MARC 21 records as well as to enable the creation of original resource description records. It includes a subset of MARC fields and uses language-based tags rather than numeric ones, in some cases regrouping elements from the MARC 21 bibliographic format. This schema is currently in draft status…
…the schema does not target round-tripability with MARC 21. In other words, an original MARC 21 record converted to MODS may not convert back to MARC 21 in its entirety without some loss of specificity in tagging or loss of data. In some cases if reconverted into MARC 21, the data may not be placed in exactly the same field that it started in because a MARC field may have been mapped to a more general one in MODS.

Compared to MARC, MODS is simplier and uses word tags (like name, titleInfo, and originInfo) instead of numeric tags (100, 245, 260).  There is not a 1 to 1 mapping between MARC and MODS, so conversion between the two might introduce some challenges.

Let’s look at the book example used in the analysis of the other standards:

Geary, Edward A. A History of Emery County. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1996.

The Library of Congress represents this book in MODS here.

The three key pieces of information (author, title, and publication) are represented in MODS as follows:

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Previous posts have explored a better way to cite online sources (Part 1), how citation information can be stored as a file using GEDCOM format (Part 2) and MARC format (Part 3). This post takes the next logical step and discusses MARC XML.

MARC was created as a machine-readable format many decades ago. In the last decade, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been developed as a standard format to allow validation, processing, and transformation of data. MARC XML takes the MARC format and represents it as XML. This is done in a lossless way so that conversions between MARC and MARC XML will not lose any data.

A book represented as a Source List Entry in Evidence Explained looks like this:

Geary, Edward A. A History of Emery County. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1996.

That same book listed with the Library of Congress is shown here as MARC XML.

Let’s quickly compare the MARC entries for author, title, and publication with the corresponding representation in MARC XML.

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