Earlier this week, I had my farewell party at the National Archives, where I had worked for 8.5 years as a consultant and project manager in the IT department. I quit my job to focus full-time on my genealogy business. Besides doing client research, I will also be doing consultancy for IT-projects in the heritage sector.
Europeana and Archives Portal Europe
My first consultancy project is a very exciting one. I will be investigating the opportunities for collaboration between Europeana and commercial genealogy suppliers. Europeana is a web portal funded by the European Union that provides access to digital content of heritage organizations (archives, libraries and museums). Its satellite website, Archives Portal Europe (APE) provides access to content from archives, including scans where available. Unlike the websites of many of these institutions, APE has an English interface. The content of several Dutch archives can be found here.
Archives Portal Europe homepage
Project for Europeana awareness
The Europeana Awareness project aims to increase awareness of Europeana with suppliers and users of heritage information. As part of this project, opportunities for new partnerships are investigated and developed. I will be doing one task for this larger project: investigating the opportunities for Europeana to collaborate with commercial suppliers of online services to the genealogy and local history sectors. The result of my task will be a report that provides the following information:
- overview of the major players in the European genealogy market
- the type of current and future Europeana content that they might be interested in
- best practices for collaborations between archives and commercial suppliers
- conditions under which commercial suppliers would be interested in collaborating with Europeana.
The report will be available in December and will be for free for everyone to read and reuse.
Who Do You Think You Are? Live! in Scotland
To start, I am attending Who Do You Think You Are? Live! in Glasgow, Scotland this weekend to talk to representatives of several commercial suppliers. I will also be talking to genealogists and archivists from the UK and Ireland about ways that archives and commercial suppliers already work together to provide online access to genealogical information.
What a great way to start this new phase in my career!
About Yvette Hoitink
Yvette:
Thank you again so much for the time we spent together on August 19 when my wife, Sheryl, and I returned to the Hague for the day. The 2 years had gone by so fast since we had last visited and spent the time with you researching our Brink family heritage, visiting Wangeningen with you, and your setting up the meeting for us in Arnhem at the Archives to see the 1676 map.
We know how much you have done to help us learn more about our family before Lambert Huybertse and his wife, Hendrickje Cornelisse, left for the New Netherlands in December 1660 with their 2 children. It was of course Lambert and his sons that took the surname Brink that became the basis for our name in the United States today.
We look forward to staying in touch, receiving your weekly newsletters, and updating ourselves to your progress in your business and all the benefit and value you will be able to provide to clients and customers.
All the very best,
Dennis and Sheryl Brink
[email redacted for privacy reasons and to prevent spam]