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Coffs Harbour District Family History Society workshop



Yesterday I spoke about Trove at the Coffs Harbour District Family History Society's monthly workshop.  This was my second presentation to this group. My topic last year was on Google.

My main aim for this presentation was to show why is it important to register with Trove, why tagging is brilliant and the benefits for whole community if we correct the OCR text.

Before I started I needed to gauge what the audience knew about Trove so I asked the following questions?


  1. Who hasn't heard of Trove?
  2. Who has heard of Trove but never been to the website?
  3. Who has registered with Trove?
  4. What has made corrections to text?
  5. Who has added tags to articles?
  6. Who hasn't printed and saved?
  7. Who has used Trove but have not found anything useful or interesting? 
There were a couple who hadn't heard of Trove. Less than one half of the 40 people in the room had registered with Trove, fewer had made corrections and added tags. Others were not aware that you could save and print the articles. One person hadn't found anything useful or interesting. 

Participants were given an overview of Trove and the types of information they could find. I shared some of my finds. My most interesting find, my saddest find, how you can be lucky and verify some family stories and how country news was often reported in city papers. Several participants told of one of their great finds. One lady told the audience how she had managed to trace a family and their business dealings through advertisements in several Victorian papers.

Together we edited the text of a short article and decided on the appropriate tags. I then showed and explained a tag cloud and how they could immediately find all the articles relating to one tag.

I ran through a few advanced search features. The one that most people found very useful was quotes around words you want to be next to each other e.g. "Summer Hill" instead of Summer Hill when searching. There were some aha moments.

Thanks to Geniaus for lending me her Useful Tips, which I gave the participants with credit to her.

I took one comment from a lady that she wanted to go home straight away as a compliment. I think Trove  would have been her website of choice last night.

Thank you to the Coffs Harbour Family History Society for inviting me to speak to the group. I thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon.



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Comments

  1. GeniAusMay 27, 2012 at 5:41 PM

    Lucky Coffs Harbour District FHS to have such a pro present to them.

    Pleased you and the members enjoyed the gig. Thanks for the mention.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RodMay 31, 2012 at 6:49 PM

    I love Trove!!! What an amazing set of resources it is! I'm surprised how few people know about it, so it is wonderful to have someone who can spread the word and show how to make best use of it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SharonMay 31, 2012 at 7:39 PM

    Thanks Rod. I've been asked back to run another workshop on blogging. Think I'll include Facebook and Twitter as well. Not sure if it will be towards the end of this year or early next.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Inside History magazineJune 4, 2012 at 10:26 PM

      Trove simply is amazing. Well done you for spreading the word.

      Delete

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