Note: This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, genealogists are major users of books and anything that affects book publishing will sooner or later affect genealogists.

Rising paper prices are forcing publishers to change. From the Economist: That way, a publisher can find paper for things it wants to print, even in times of shortage. The industry is now going through another period of scarcity, and the war is again the cause (along with the pandemic). The cost of paper used by British book publishers has risen by 70% in the past 12 months. Supplies are erratic and also expensive: paper mills shut down on days when electricity is too expensive. The card used in the hard cover was sometimes impossible to obtain. The whole trade is in trouble. It doesn’t affect every author: the new thriller by Robert Galbraith, better known as JK Rowling, clocks in at 1,024 pages and has reached the top of the UK bestseller lists this week. But the other books have to change a bit. Pick up a new release in a bookstore, and if it’s from a smaller publisher (as they suffer more from price increases), you may find yourself in the hands of a product that, like wartime books, bears the mark of its time.

Blow on its pages and they may rise and fall differently: some books use cheaper, lighter paper. Look closely at its print and you may notice that the letters are moving closer together: some cost-conscious publishers are beginning to reduce the spaces between characters. The text can also move closer to the edges of the pages: the publication margin shrinks in every sense. Changes of this nature can cause concern for publishers. A book is not just words on a page, says Ivan O’Brien, head of The O’Brien Press in Ireland, it must appeal to “all the senses”. The pleasure of a book that lies easily in the hand – not too light and not too heavy; pages cream; beetle-black fonts are what publishers want to keep. […] Because at the heart of the publishing industry lies an unspeakable truth: most people can’t write, and most books are very bad. Readers who struggle with volume often assume it’s their fault. Reviewers who have read many more books know that this is not the case.

Comment by Dick Eastman: With all these difficulties faced by book publishers, we all can expect more and more ebooks to be published in the future. I see that as a positive thing.

Magnetic audiotape was the workhorse of radio in the 1980s, in KGOU's early days of serving the campus community at the University of Oklahoma with music and a few NPR programs. Local news and feature interviews, and sometimes whole radio shows were recorded on reels of tape and saved for future use, or erased and recorded over with the next episode.

But audiotape begins to deteriorate after about 10 years, depending on how and where it is stored. If properly cared for, it can last longer, but is likely to start to disintegrate or suffer severe loss of audio quality with the passage of time.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH, has been working against time to save and digitize early public radio recordings on tape or other technology that has come and gone since, such as audio cassettes or digital audio tape (DAT). The work was begun in 2013 with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and later, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2019, AAPB expanded its efforts, launching a fellowship program to place graduate fellows with university programs to help local public stations preserve their archives.

“We don’t really know everything we have on reel-to-reel tape, or how far back it goes,” said Jim Johnson, KGOU’s program director. “It wasn’t labeled very well, or the label has come off or faded over the years. But we know we have recordings of KGOU coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and also some programming by and for Native Americans that is culturally important.”

You can read a lot more in an article by Laura Knoll and published in the KGOU web site at: https://bit.ly/3U6Qg7e.

Have you used WorldCat to research your family tree? If not, you are missing one of the best online web sites for use in genealogy.

Quoting from https://www.worldcat.org/topics/genealogy:

WorldCat.org connects genealogical researchers to millions of pieces of unique content not found elsewhere.

Newspapers, family Bibles, cemetery and burial archives, microfilm, and digitized local records—it’s a treasure trove of family history waiting to be uncovered. Learn how to make the most of this powerful, global resource.

Connecting you to an incredible range of resources

Genealogists love libraries and archives because they are often the only source for unique, local information about births, deaths, marriages, businesses, and other family histories. WorldCat.org can connect you to a huge variety of sources of information in this topic area including:

Cemetery and burial records

United States Civil War and other military records

Family Bibles, church histories, and records

General genealogical resources, such as directories, handbooks, and magazines

Indexes of births, marriages, deaths, wills, and obituaries

Microfilmed genealogy and local history collections

Newspapers from many countries

Photographs

Slavery and antislavery materials, including slave records

Town histories and probate records

In addition to library resources, WorldCat.org also connects you to millions of records from FamilySearch, a nonprofit family history organization with the largest collection of genealogical and historic records in the world.

You can start at: https://www.worldcat.org/topics/genealogy.

Two Jersey heritage organisations have merged their collections to create an online catalogue of the island's history. Jersey Heritage and Société Jersiaise hope to make them more accessible to the public.

Heritage will provide its archive and museum collections, and Société Jersiaise have brought its photographic and library collections to the website at https://catalogue.jerseyheritage.org/.

Director of Archives and Collections at Jersey Heritage Linda Romeril said the website was the "culmination of a number of years of work" between the two organisations.

She said: "Researchers can now search across the collections of both heritage organisations, allowing them to see documents and photographs that were previously held in different places.

"Linking up the resources available makes them more accessible to the public, whether they are carrying out research about their family history or on a professional basis.”

The website has more than 800,000 descriptions of items.

Archivist at the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive Patrick Cahill said: “The new shared online catalogue is great for users and demonstrates the benefits of taking a collaborative approach to cultural heritage in Jersey."

Scotland’s National Centre for excellence in bagpiping has launched a new, free to access digital resource and research hub. The Archives from The National Piping Centre will protect the heritage and legacy of piping in Scotland and make valuable pieces of piping history available for students, scholars and enthusiasts around the world.

The Archives from The National Piping Centre holds digitised copies of five influential piping periodicals dating back to 1948 - Piping Times, Piping Today, The International Piper, Piper and Dancer and Notes from the Piping Centre - as well as photograph galleries of piping through the years. 

It also incorporates The Centre’s Noting the Tradition oral history archive, which holds recorded interviews with people involved in piping at all levels and all over Scotland over the past 50 years.

Available to access at archives.thepipingcentre.co.uk , The Archives from The National Piping Centre keeps the legacy of these publications, information, conversations, images and other materials alive and makes them more easily accessible than ever before.

You can read a lot more at: https://bit.ly/3DdB7eG

Geneanet (based in France) has reached a major milestone: 5 million photos of graves are now online. Many of these photos are taken in Europe although a few might be from North America.

The Geneanet approach is comparable to, but different from Find-a-Grave and others. At Geneanet, there is always at least one actual photo of a grave or monument in the database, so no copied lists, funeral home announcement scrapings, or blank entries. No one "owns" a grave record at Geneanet; gravestones are available for indexing by everyone, not just the photographer (although as a photographer, you can index your own photos of course). The company discourages the photography of recent graves, out of respect for the deceased.

Here is the announcement from Geneanet:

These photos are freely accessible, as is all data shared by Geneanet members. Our “Save Our Graves” project simplifies the uploading and indexing of gravesite photos, through a smartphone/tablet app (iOS and Android) and an online indexing tool. The goal is simple: preserve the memory of the departed by indexing their names with gravesite photos.

In many European countries, churchyard space is limited (many churches are hundreds of years old) and large cemeteries are not commonplace. Perpetual care plots are the exception; most plots are leased. It is often the case that plots considered abandoned are dug up and made available for the recently deceased. Any remains found are buried in an ossuary or potter’s field, a common grave. So what is an abandoned plot? In France for example, town halls manage the contact list for cemetery plots. When a lease expires on a grave more than 30 years old, a public notice is shown at the cemetery gate, a letter is sent to the lessor of record, and the grave is marked with a “Lease expired, please contact town hall” notice. With no response within 1 year (this just changed; it was previously 3 years), the plot is emptied for someone else. “Save Our Graves” is an effort to document gravesites which could disappear, if surviving family members have moved and not visited the cemetery for some time. Of course, it is useful to document all graves and monuments: finding the burial place of an ancestor opens new avenues of research, and gravestones often provide vital clues with dates and other family members!

Access the photo collection through the “Search” menu, “Cemeteries and Memorials”:

A lot more information, including step-by-step instructions on searching the database, may be found at: https://bit.ly/3xe1ywW.

NOTE: This article has nothing to do with genealogy. If you are looking for genealogy-related information, I suggest you skip this article. However, if you live in an area susceptible to wildfires, or if you have relatives who live in an area susceptible to wildfires, you may find the web site discussed in this article to be very important to you. I am publishing the article here to give it as much publicity as possible.

A new web service by a California-based mapping company shows detailed information on wildfires in real time. It shows information like nearby population size, climate and drought conditions to try to give people context on wildfires around them.

Esri is a Southern California-based company that works with geographic information systems (GIS) which collects, visualizes and analyzes data in digital maps.

Chris Ferner is a wildland fire specialist for the company. She said Esri developed Wildfire Aware to display information beyond basic containment and acreage numbers.

"We're using that authoritative data such as from the Forest Service or from Cal Fire and saying, 'Well, what else is important besides just the standard facts?' We also want to know how many people live right there," she said.

Ferner said Esri developed the map to help people get more information into wildfires around them. But she said they can also use it to check on friends or family threatened by wildfires anywhere in the country.

You can rad more at: https://bit.ly/3QtzwnJ.

The Esri web site may be found at: https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wildfireware/

The following announcement was written by Unlock the Past:

A world-class family history conference with in-person and virtual options

Adelaide, South Australia, 8 September 2022

Unlock the Past is delighted to announce that Family History Down Under 2022 (FHDU 2022) is now just two months away. The 4-day in-person conference will be held 8-11 November 2022 at Castle Hill, near Sydney. Two virtual options bring FHDU 2022 within reach of anyone, wherever they are, who cannot join us at Castle Hill.

Overview

There will be four main themes or tracks – DNA; Researching Abroad; Australia & New Zealand; Methodology & General. Choose from 70+ presentations from 35 presenters from seven countries, plus 11 workshops and two conference dinners. The exhibition, which is both in-person and virtual, offers big savings from sponsors and exhibitors. And around AU$12,000 in prizes will be up for grabs. The FHDU 2022 Community (a private Facebook chat group) will be available for interaction between attendees, speakers and sponsors. All presentations, except workshops and conference dinner talks, will be available for all attendees (in-person and virtual) to view until 28 February 2023.

Venue

Castle Hill RSL Club is a fantastic venue. It is close to Sydney, Australia’s largest city, with access via Sydney Metro Northwest rail, onsite parking and plenty of accommodation nearby. It has multiple large capacity conference rooms and multiple lounges, bars and dining choices for these who would like to gather after each day’s program.

Unlock the Past / Family History Down Under

Unlock the Past is the event and publishing division of Gould Genealogy & History (established 1976). It is a collaborative venture involving an international team of expert speakers, writers, organisations and commercial partners to promote history and genealogy through innovative major events and publications. Recent events have been DNA Down Under and Family History Down Under 2021.

Family History Down Under 2022 — our final event

It is now time to call it a day! Since 2003 we have organised around 150 events — expos, conferences, roadshows, 17 genealogy cruises, Australia’s first significant battlefield tour, seminars and more. FHDU 2022 will be our final event.

I hope you will join us at Castle Hill, or virtually, for one last farewell event in November 2022. Find out more at www.fhdu22.com.

The following is a press release written by the Irish Genealogical Research Society:

Background

In anticipation that with the next update, in a day or two, of the main names index of this project having more than 500,000 records we are having an on-line event. This is the culmination of work of volunteers over fifteen years. While the number of names in the Registry of Deeds is in the millions, the project is making accessing these important records easier. Now, wherever you are in the world using the images available through familysearch.org

To celebrate a major milestone for our project we have arranged for four experts on the Registry of Deeds and its use for family and local history to give their experience of using the Registry.

About this event:

This event will consist of four short presentations 20 minutes each followed by a question and answer session. The presenters will be

• • Nick Reddan – project webmaster

  • Rosaind McCutcheon – the project's greatest contributor

  • David Rencher – Chief Genealogical Officer, FamilySearch

  • Steven C. Smyrl – Chairman Irish Genealogical Research Society

All are fellows of the Irish Genealogical Research Society.

This will be a great opportunity to learn about using the Registry of Deeds and ask question of some of the leading experts on the Registry of Deeds and family history.

To register for this event go to the following link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/registry-of-deeds-index-project-ireland-500k-tickets-413798270767

Note there are limited places.