I haven't visited this list for awhile but I thought I'd mention the following. WeRelate.org is starting work on a free digital library service for genealogical and historical societies to post historical documents (images and transcriptions). We've partnered with the USF Africana Heritage project (see http://www.africanaheritage.com/) to host a number of slave plantation records, and we're talking with other societies as well. The free service will use Dspace, an open-source java digital library package jointly developed by HP and MIT, currently in use at 270 organizations (see http://www.dspace.org).
We'll be modifying Dspace to * use MySQL (instead of postgres -- there's an experimental patch for this), * store bitstreams on Amazon S3 (experimental patch for this as well), * provide genealogy-fielded search (using Lucene), and * generally be customized for storing and displaying genealogical documents and images. WeRelate.org (http://www.werelate.org) launched about two years ago. It is now the world's largest genealogy wiki. It is operated in partnership with the Allen County Public Library, the US's second-largest genealogy library. Over 1 million pages for people and families have been created in the past 8 months. All content is licensed under an open-content license. Access to the site is completely free. We rely on donations, and soon we'll augment that with ads. With the upcoming digital library we plan to do for content that submitters _don't_ want publicly editable what the wiki is currently doing for publicly-editable content. If you're interested in helping out, please send me an email. We're looking for people who are comfortable with java, and also people who can do graphics/HTML/CSS. Dallan Quass President Foundation for On-Line Genealogy [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
