Social Networking For Genealogists

The Glenview Public Library has purchased the following book. I expect it to enhance your genealogical research, and help you find new ways to communicate and share with other family history researchers:

Social Networking for Genealogists by Drew Smith

Genealogical Pub. Co., c2009

R929.10285 SMI GENEALOGY

(A circulating copy is on order)

Contents: RSS -- Tags -- Message boards and mailing lists -- Blogs -- Wikis -- Collaborative editing -- Photo and video sharing -- Social bookmarking -- Sharing personal libraries -- Podcasts -- Social networking for its own sake -- Virtual worlds -- Genealogy-specific social networking.

This book describes the wide array of social networking services that are now available online and highlights how these services can be used by genealogists to share information, photos, and videos with family, friends, and other researchers.

Each chapter guides you through a unique category of social networking services using genealogy-related examples. From blogs and wikis to general social networking sites that have genealogy applications, such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Life, author Drew Smith shows you how to incorporate these powerful new tools into your family history research.

This book is about the type of social networking that has been made possible by the development of international computer networks, the availability of network access to most homes (especially broadband access), the creation of websites dedicated to particular kinds of networking (posting photos, viewing and commenting on videos, seeing what books friends have in their libraries, etc.), and the ease of participating in these sites without having to be a computer expert. It identifies those kinds of social networking sites and services that will be of the most interest to genealogists.

THE AUTHOR: Drew Smith, MLS, is an academic librarian with the University of South Florida in Tampa. An expert in digital genealogy, with a lifelong interest in family history research, he is Director of the Federation of Genealogical Societies and President of the Florida Genealogical Society of Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to Digital Genealogist magazine and is co-host of the weekly Genealogy Guys Podcast.