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Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Research Room Ramblings


I just returned from three wonderful days in Fort Worth attending the Texas State Genealogical Society Annual Conference and what a conference it was!  It was their largest one yet and featured an old colleague of our library director’s, Curt Witcher, head of the Genealogy Department at Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.   Curt is an absolutely delightful speaker who I really enjoyed.  He did a session for Librarian’s Day, which was day one.  The main point of his talk went along well with the next speaker's topic which was Give ‘em What They Want – in most cases that is online access to local sources and databases.  Far more of our genealogy customers, both local and non, do not come into the building, but do visit our website.  Are we neglecting these unseen people?  The gist, of course, is that we need to provide online digital content, ie. local record databases on our website. Curt said that in his experience, as people utilize our online records, there is an increase in visits to our brick and mortar building. This is an area my department really needs to work on as we really don’t have anything.

Paul Follett
Genealogy Librarian
Lawton Public Library
110 SW Fourth St.,
Lawton, OK 73501