Fifteen or so years ago, when I first got involved with online genealogy, the mailing lists for the counties I was researching were all quite busy, often having message counts in the hundreds each month - now, many of them would be lucky to count in the dozens of messages in any given month. There was lots of input and interaction, but in recent years, it seems to have gotten very quiet. Where are all the researchers hiding and why?
I have my own theories about this, but other than my hunches, I have no way of knowing how valid my ideas are. From my own years of involvement with the USGenWeb Project (hereinafter USGW), I do know that there are were a couple of factors that I feel have contributed to the lack of activity seen in many parts of that project.
- Volunteers must secure their own hosting options, choosing in many cases to utilize the free option provided by RootsWeb, which, unfortunately, limits rather severely the technology at their disposal. Because of this, many of the sites in the project end up having to be hand-coded, a time-consuming process that tends to lead to a lack of interest in updating as often as would be helpful. Stale websites tend to be ignored, not just by the search engines, but also by the public as a whole. County coordinators cannot directly solicit donations for the upkeep of their sites, so if they want to use more advanced technology, its cost come out of their pocket.
- Within a few years of its beginnings, the USGW implemented a nation-wide Archives section, enabling searches across the entire database nation-wide or within a subset, such as a state or county. Soon, more and more of the local sites were placing as much of their content as possible into the Archives, effectively turning the county sites merely into portals to the Archives. Less and less actual data appeared in the county sites, so they tended to attract less visitors.
- Queries and various other forms of visitor input that were often incorporated into the sites sites i the early days are now routinely sent to third-party providers rather than being housed within the county sites. Mailing lists for each county are accessible both through email and through the RootsWeb/Ancestry boards, but the mailing list messages only include those generated through email, while the boards include all the messages. This, again, lead users away from the email lists and onto the boards.
- All in all, the county sites, in far too many cases, do not generate enough interest to get new blood involved in the sites, with the net result that, though there is a great deal of information that could be added to these sites, it does not happen.
While I can understand why some might feel that a nation-wide, searchable archives system is a necessity, I have never been in fan of the idea. The standard argument in favor of it, usually suggests that visitors may not know where to search for a particular ancestor and so would benefit from being able to search across a wide area. Personally, I feel that if they don't yet have enough information to determine where that ancestor lived at some point, they may also not have enough info to determine whether he's the one they seek out of however many hits they find in a search.
I'm also a firm believer in the idea that folks who visit websites seeking roots are interested in helping others do the same. If a site provides no way for visitors to interact on the site, those visitors will probably not spend much time there. If, on the other hand, they can interact and even possibly see their own names there as a contributor, they are more likely to be active on the site and visit regularly.
