Thursday, May 22, 2008

Final report on NGS

By far, the big event that I thought was important was the announcement that Family Link will be working with the Family History Library Catalog. I'm sure bringing the catalog into what sounds like it will be a more wiki environment is going to be a great improvement. That should be a good central place to start research queries. I'm glad that it will encompass digitized and non-digitized works. I'm impressed that a company that is so focused on the internet can see the value of "one of the most valuable tools in the world for family history." They are right. It is. (And Paul Allen started a Master's in Library Science at BYU just before I was there. I'm glad I finished mine :-).

I'm concerned that there were so many vendors that apparently didn't show at NGS. It sounds like the numbers were similar to recent years for attendees. That is good. But again, we did many times better with our regular orders than we did with conference orders last week. Conferences are always good for networking and getting a feel for what customers want and what is going on the industry. That is important. And they are so darn fun--the icing on the cake of running a genealogy business. I'm glad we have My Ancestors Found doing conferences out west more and that their conferences are just as well put on and well attended.

Kim gathered several new affiliates and started some new partnerships that we will be working on. I'll let you know as things develop.

It looks like Legacy is about ready with their printing capabilities in their charting program. We are looking forward to being able to work with them on that. I think it will be a great deal easier for their users to be able to submit charts to us through the software.

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