Minutes of the Board of Directors for the USGenWeb Census Project

Meeting held December 10th, 2001 via Internet using mIRC beginning at 7:14 PM EDT and
ending at 10:32 PM EDT.

Present:
     Ellen Horner, Vice President
     Sandy Onbey, Secretary/Treasurer
     April Phillips
     Connie Burkett
     Sue Soden

A quorum being set, President Pro-tem, Ellen Horner called the meeting to order in the
absence of President, Wayne Duncan.

Officer, board, or standing committee reports: None

Special orders addressed: None

Minutes of the November 12th, 2001 meeting have not yet been sent electronically and will
have to be reviewed at a later date.

Old Business:

  USTPO:

    Wayne Duncan said that he would try to call them again tomorrow.

  RECIPROCAL LETTER:

    Wayne Duncan had drafted a letter to be sent to the Advisory Board of the USGW
    Project. After some minor revisions were made the letter was sent. He will keep us
    informed of any
    replies received.

  NON-STANDARD FILES UPLOADED:

    We have started processing NON-Standard files. Files that might not have all the
    columns, or be in a format that we can't easily convert to Excel to make the TEXT
    files that we put on-line. We are keeping them separate by adding an "x" in the front
    of the state name.

    A discussion was held on how we would link to them and from where, but no final
    decision was made. We all liked the way Connie had set up her WV page with links to
    standard, non-standard and off site files for the benefit of the researchers
    (http://www.us-census.org/research/wv-links.html). The new pages being for the
    researchers, and the assignment pages being for the transcribers. We can benefit the
    researchers with the new pages like Connie's, but still uphold our standards by not
    linking to the non-standard files from the assignments pages.

New Business:

  USGENNET:

    A discussion regarding the USGenNet Domain Hosting Fee was held and it was decided
    that Sue would contact Fred Smoot for more information about it. Several of the Board
    Members volunteered to help with the fee should it be necessary, depending upon the
    reply Sue receives from Fred.

    Sue offered to have Fred Smoot subscribe those of us that wished to the ANNOUNCE
    list.a list that reports both the financial and other information about USGenNet, the
    server and the non-profit organization.

  1930 CENSUS:

    A discussion was held on how to handle the new census records soon to be released on
    the 1930 census. With so many public records being removed from the Internet due to
    complaints and possibilities of data available for identity theft there is a concern.
    Most of the information used is social security numbers and maiden names of mother's
    which are not included in the census records. It was decided that rather than go
    through the  reformatting of all the pages at this time since there are 2,667 new
    records, we would refer those that wished to transcribe these records to the NARA site
    to obtain the reel numbers and other information we would need and add them as
    assigned.

Wayne Duncan adjourned the meeting at 10:31 PM EDT to reconvene on January 7th, 2002 at
8:00 PM EDT

Items for next Board Meeting: