"Smart Catalog" coming to Fort Wayne

One of the Midwest's premier research destinations will roll out a new on-line catalog system this Thursday! See the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's video on their blog.

On first viewing of the video, I'm excited about having a visible search trail and alerts via RSS feeds. I'm hopeful that this new system will make it possible to unify the Genealogy Center's microtext catalog with the main catalog in searching -- and that it will make it easier to figure out the proper configuration of words for subject searches, especially geographical ones. And I hope that the ability to view books title by title as they appear on the physical shelves will be preserved.

Learn more about Indiana vital records

Did you know that the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library has a blog in addition to the monthly e-zine "Genealogy Gems"? Well, it does, and the most recent post, by John, advances our knowledge of how to work with Indiana vital records sources, especially in Lake and Allen counties, two of the most populous in the state.

One thing we almost always learn from such careful examinations is that the popular derivative sources (in this case the typescript WPA indexes and the Ancestry.com database derived from them) are not always complete, or as simple to use as one might think. There's more going on here than the usual problem of derivative sources being copied at several removes from the original records. Check it out!