Friday, October 10, 2008

Genealogy Today's new Live Roots web site

Wouldn't it be nice to have one resource that showed every site where a genealogical resource was available so you could select the closest or most affordable resource? And wouldn't it be nice to know if a particular resource was available ONLY by subscription or if it were also available online for free? -- in the vast world of available information, there is duplication. Further, wouldn't it be nice to know if you found a valuable resource that was not online but was available somewhere in print or on CD, that you could easily connect with someone who could check that resource for you? Such a service is the vision of Genealogy Today's new Live Roots web site, announced today.

Genealogy Today (www.genealogytoday.com) announced the release of a new web site designed to help researchers locate genealogical data -- both online and offline, and either digitized or in-print. Live Roots (www.liveroots.com) bridges the gaps between independent web sites, large commercial repositories and printed materials yet to be digitized and published on the World Wide Web.

Live Roots extends beyond the typical bounds of a traditional search engine or link directory by facilitating access to offline records and publications through partnerships with amateur and professional researchers who either own copies or are geographically close to the libraries and archives that do. In a few quick steps, visitors will be able to hire a researcher to obtain digital copies (scanned or hi-res photo) of pages referencing a specific name (or surname).

For many of the resources in its catalog, Live Roots captures names from their listings and aggregates the data into a searchable index. This makes it possible to locate names within resources, rather than just searching for keywords in titles and descriptions. This includes many of the resources that have yet to be digitized and/or transcribed online.

Using Live Roots, researchers will be able to clearly see where duplication exists among sites, and with its focus on the accessibility of the resources (i.e. online versus offline, free versus paid), they will be able to work more efficiently. By bridging the gap between online researchers and offline resources, Live Roots hopes to make more genealogical information accessible than ever before.

For more details, visit http://www.liveroots.com/

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