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Proposal for a Pavilion - GENUKI
- To: fairmaster@park.org
- Subject: Proposal for a Pavilion - GENUKI
- From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jan 96 15:49:51 0000
Hi:
I'm very impressed with your World Expo, which I learnt of from Cliff Manis, who has a People Pavilion entitled "Find Your Family Tree", leading to his GenServ page. (I wrote the first manual for GenServ.)
Deep inside his site there is a link to the site that I and a number of colleagues have set up, but I'd like to offer it to you as an actual pavilion. This is the GENUKI site:
which is the UK & Ireland Genealogy Information Service.
What is special about the GENUKI "site" is that it a virtual reference library that is in fact spread over a number of computers in various institutions across the world, yet has been organized so that (i) it presents a common look and feel to the users who in many cases are unaware that it is not a single site, and (ii) it is capable of continuing to expand in size through many orders of magnitude, and to involve many more people in its development, while it remains easy to use and difficult to get lost in.
GENUKI has been in operation for just nine, but has expanded continuously and already has over twenty people involved in its development (none of whom had met each other before). It started quite unofficially, but is now being supported by the UK Federation of Family History Societies, and a whole host of its member societies (most of whose committee members had never heard of the Internet a few months ago), plus quite a few libraries and official archives. It has received a Top 5% of the Web award, and has been the subject of a number of published papers (and one Australian Master's Thesis in Library Science! :-) already.
If you take a look at the front page at the above URL, you will find a link to a page describing how the service is organized - both as seen by a user, and as seen by developers. I do not know personally of any other such distributed scaleable web "site", especially one organized cooperatively as a noncommercial volunteer venture. (Within the field of genealogy/family history I am pretty sure it is unique - I know of no other country having such an organized cooperative and coherent provision of genealogy information on the web, rather just a jumbled attic of disparate web sites. We in fact have been trying to persuade our American friends to adopt a GENUKI-like organizational scheme, and retrieve some order out of what we view as their present chaos.)
Please let me know if you would like any further information about GENUKI.
Yours sincerely
Brian Randell
(on behalf of UK Genealogy WWW maintainers <genukiwww@mcc.ac.uk>)
Dept. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell@newcastle.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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