21COFH - Educational Materials - Week 38

Last week our project was to work with digital educational materials. This week, we tackle the paper. If you have been involved with family history and genealogy for a while, I'm betting you have a ton of handouts, syllabi, workbooks and notes from classes, meetings and conferences. It will be much easier to refer to them if they have been digitized and are searchable.

The steps are similar to last week with a couple of additions:

1. Utilize your organizational scheme.
2. Consider the use of metadata.
3. Decide what to digitize (and what to even keep at all for that matter).
4. Scan away.

I have several mini projects to choose from and I'll bet you do to. Here's what I have:

1. Several three ring binders of handouts and notes from society meetings and seminars. All nicely organized by topic and/or location. These go back to the 1990s when I first started seriously researching.
2. More recent notes and handouts that somehow landed in a pile instead of the file.
3. National Institute of Genealogical Studies (NIGS) courses. Four of those 3 inch binders full of material. Why I didn't download the materials when I had the chance, I'll never know. But I could make a serious hole on a shelf by digitizing these.
4. National conference and Family History Expo syllabi. These suckers are big and would also clear up some serious shelf space if they were digitized.

Tip: Evernote is perfect for a project like this. The free account will scan your image files and make both printed and handwritten text searchable. The premium account will also do this for PDFs.

What materials can you digitize and clean out this week? Let us know in the comments or a post of your own and leave the URL in the comments. I'll have the results of my project up tomorrow.


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© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

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