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GENUKI help wanted |
This page is primarily intended to help people who have volunteered to help develop county and/or parish pages in GENUKI. However it may also be of interest to anyone considering helping with an area who wishes to find out more about what would be involved.
The main requirements of any volunteers are threefold:
Ideally a volunteer developing pages would also be able to host the web pages on their own web site. This may not always be possible though and should not be an impediment. One solution might be to share the task between two people, one hosting the pages and the other developing them.
A good description of the rationale behind GENUKI may be found online. If you haven't done so already, please take time to read this, concentrating in particular on the documents about how the information in GENUKI is presented to users, and the standards adhered to by the information providers (this part also has many tips on how to structure your county and parish pages).
It is also a good idea at this stage to look at some of the other parts of GENUKI to get a feel for the structure and sort of information contained in the pages. The providers table can be consulted to see which counties are already well developed with a large set of parish pages.
County developers should also try to establish good links with the relevant family history societies so that they can become involved with the pages, providing input in terms of advice and content, and possibly also providing members who are able to share the load. Ideally county and parish pages should be developed in cooperation with the relevant family history societies. At the very least it is likely that county developers will be members of the relevant family history societies.
Basically a county page gives researchers relevant information about that particular county. This is usually presented in the form of a number of short paragraphs, each dealing with a different subject e.g. books of possible interest, family history societies, local archives etc.
A county page should not contain information on specific parishes. Instead a page should be made for each parish and a list of these provided on the county page as links. As an example of this, look at the Roxburghshire page.
When thinking about developing a county it is always worth bearing in mind how other volunteers could help you, perhaps splitting the task between two or more people (perhaps on geographical or topical lines), or having a single person co-ordinate the bulk of the pages, with others offering specialist knowledge in particular geographical areas or topics of interest. If you live outside the county could you find someone on the spot to help you find out information about unusual local records and other resources? It is also a good idea to think of all the things you would like to do for a county, even if you don't personally have the time to achieve them all. Then if someone contacts you asking how they can help you with the pages will have already thought about it.
There are various ways of finding volunteers to help with pages, all of which could be tried:
All of these are likely to be more successful if you have thought quite carefully about what you would like to see done to pages and how other people could help you achieve that. Have a brain-storming session, and look at other counties within GENUKI to get lots of ideas (see later about this as well). Then when you send out a call for help (a page for volunteers, message to a mailing list, or an article for the family history society) mention these.
In the same way that county pages provide information on a particular county, parish pages give information on particular parishes, for example Melrose and Ettrick parish pages. Notice the way in which both pages contain links to other pages: Ettrick to a list of surnames in the churchyard, and Melrose to a number of on-line guides about the parish.
A nice touch in both cases is a short excerpt from an old gazetteer (this is also used on the relevant county pages). If you want to quote material on your pages then make sure that either the copyright has definitely lapsed or that you have permission from the copyright holder. Ideally the quotation will be from the 18th or 19th century, so copyright should not be a problem. For further guidance on this subject, please read David Hawgood's articles:
Parishes are an obvious area for splitting the task among many people and it is well worth bearing this in mind, whether you have a complete set of parish pages already up and running, just a few, or even none at all. Think about how others could help you with this.
In addition to county and parish pages there are lots of topic pages within GENUKI. These are used when the information on a particular topic is quite lengthy and allow further information to be given about this without compromising the compact nature of a county or parish page (topic pages are also used at higher levels, e.g. national and above, to expand on subjects there).
Examples of topic pages include:
The list here really could go on and on and this is another area, as with parishes, where more volunteers can step in to help, sharing specialist knowledge on particular topics of interest to genealogists. Such topic pages can be held on the other person's website (within a GENUKI compatible hierarchy) or could be incorporated within another website holding pages for the area.
Generally speaking, the bulk of the work in creating the parish pages is taken up in research, finding material to put on the pages. Producing the HTML probably takes a fraction of that time.
Two good ways of coming up with ideas for the content of the pages are:
To get you thinking a bit more about the possible content of your pages, all of the following categories of information could appear on county or parish pages, or in more detail on a topic page:
The list could go on and on, but hopefully this will be enough to get the ideas rolling.
As a final tip, try not to make your pages too big (this applies to any pictures as well). A page should rarely be more than 30K long, otherwise it may be difficult for some people to download.
When a volunteer takes on a GENUKI county, normally they are encouraged to take a copy of the existing county page (and any parish pages), develop it/them a bit further, and then, before investing much effort in the task, seek comments from one of those existing GENUKI volunteers happy to help newcomers gain familiarity with the task and GENUKI web page conventions.
When any problems are sorted out we then arrange to link to the new pages, and to start monitoring them so as to keep the county contents list up to date, and also to check that the standards are adhered to. We also list the new volunteer in our "providers list" as now being responsible for the pages, and add him/her to the mailing list we use for discussions among the GENUKI volunteers.
A number of problems have occurred with GENUKI pages generated by WYSIWYG editors:
Many WYSIWYG editors can be used well to create GENUKI pages but may need to be configured correctly. This is why it is important that GENUKI maintainers have a good basic understanding of HTML and the web, allowing them to identify and fix problems. In addition to this they need to be confident with directory structure management (to set up and maintain web pages) and FTP (to upload web pages to their web server). If you are planning to use a WYSIWYG editor it may be wise to seek advice from existing GENUKI volunteers on potential pitfalls, and how to avoid them.
Before uploading your pages to the web please check all links. If you have any links between pages, say from a county page to a parish page, it is better to use relative links where possible:
As an example, if you want to place a link from file a.html to another file b.html and both files are stored in the same directory, you should use a link of the form:<A HREF="b.html">myLink</A>instead of something like:<A HREF="http://www.wobble.co.uk/genuki/test/b.html">myLink</A>Relative links like the first one are shorter, allow you to test your links offline and are a great help if your pages ever have to move somewhere else.
It is also a good idea to read through your pages carefully before uploading, possibly even reading them out loud to check that they make sense. It is easy when typing to miss out a letter, or transpose two letters. A quick read through can pick up on that. It may also be wise to make careful use of a spell-checker.
When you have uploaded the new version of the pages please ensure that the changes are added to the What's New and Contents pages, as described in the GENUKI standards page.
After uploading your pages you should continue to maintain them, adding new information as it comes to light and correcting any mistakes which are pointed out to you. As time goes on, your pages will gradually evolve into a detailed information resource and will be of benefit to many researchers all over the world, thanks to your valuable contribution.