The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Scanning an entire book usually is a difficult task, at best. Turning the pages manually and holding the book on a typical desktop scanner is a tedious process for a typical volume of 200 pages or more. The other problem is "curl." That is, the binding is such that most books will not lie flat on the scanner and the resultant image looks poor. Trying to convert those images to text using OCR (optical text recognition) is probably impossible.

NOTE: You can find a ...

The following announcement was written by David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States:

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Mike Wash as NARA's Open Government Executive/Chief Information Officer (CIO) effective March 27, 2011. In Charter for Change and Charting the Course,  I spoke of creating a visionary IT organization - one in which traditional technology planning and policy functions are brought together with the business of social media, open government, and digitization programs to anticipate staff and customer needs. Such an IT organization is key ...

Subtitle: How to Tether a Cell Phone

I have owned a Mi-Fi card for several years and love it. This is a small device that connects to cell towers and provides wireless data connections for laptop computers and other devices when traveling. The Mi-Fi card connection speed is about the same as that of a DSL broadband connection. Unlike wi-fi wireless, it has a range of about five miles. As long as I am within range of a cell phone tower, I have always had a high-speed Internet connection. The Mi-Fi device is about the size of four or five credit cards stacked on ...

Facebook is well-known as a service that exposes a lot of your private information. Just ask Richard Barton Jr. of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It seems that Barton recently got married and, like many newlyweds, he posted pictures of the wedding on Facebook. However, he seems to have forgotten that his first wife, the one he had not yet divorced, could see the pictures along with everyone else.

Adina Quarto married Barton in 2004 but the couple soon split up. Barton "defriended" Quarto on Facebook earlier this year. Unfortunately, defriending does not block access to every photo, ...

The following announcement was written by FamilySearch:

9 Million Browsable Images from 9 Countries Added This Week

New Records for Brazil, Canada, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, U.S., and Venezuela

The bounty just keeps coming from FamilySearch’s digital pipeline. Mexico collections earned the top spot this week, with nearly 5 million new browsable images added. The Mexico records date from 1545 to 1984. In addition to Mexico, FamilySearch continued this week to strengthen its free online international collections by ...

I recently wrote (at http://goo.gl/2GCK8) about the release of Internet Explorer version 9. Now a number of newsletter readers have written to tell that Mozilla has officially announced the final, official, release of Firefox version 4.0. Past versions of Firefox have been considered by most users to be safer, faster, and more bug-free than Internet Explorer. It's too early to tell if the latest version 4 remains that much better than Internet Explorer version 9, but early indications look promising. Even better, unlike Internet Explorer version 9, Firefox 4 works well on Windows XP ...

About a year ago, I installed Traces of the Past on my iPhone. It is (or was) an application that searches hundreds of millions of freely available historical records from countries all over the world. I wrote about it at the time at http://blog.eog...-iphone.html Now Traces of the Past has been discontinued, according to an announcement from producing company Truscape Solutions. Quoting from the company's web site at http://www.trac...hepast.com/:

We regret to announce that support for Traces of the Past has been ...

I have an interest in this question because I publish both a free and a for-pay newsletter on the web. I always wonder if my prices are too high or too low. However, larger publications often charge much, much more. Starting March 28, the New York Times will charge anyone who wishes to read more than 20 articles a month on the newspaper's web site. If you want unlimited grazing rights for Times content online, you now have to fork over $195 a year; that’s for the basic website and access on BlackBerry, iPhones or other smartphones. The cost rises to $260 if you want website and ...

Newsletter reader Harold Miller wrote to tell of a new online resource that will interest genealogists with New York City ancestors as well as many historians. In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Now the New York Times has published his map and other historic information in an online web page that makes it easy to compare the map to modern-day Manhattan. Harold also wrote, "It took me a while to figure out to click the slide on the left side to change the overlapping views."

You can view the map and the comparisons at ...

The Registrar General for Scotland has announced that the 1911 census will be released on Tuesday 5 April 2011. This census details information collected from more than 4.7 million Scots. The census images will be available for a fee on the Scotland's People web site. The following announcement was written by Scotland's People:

The Registrar General for Scotland today announced the date on which millions of personal records collected during the 1911 census will be published. On April 5, 2011, the General Register Office for Scotland will release details collected from more than ...

Writing in the Portland Press Herald, Juliana L'Heureux describes a quandary faced by the Maine Franco-American Genealogical Society. For the past 10 years the nonprofit Genealogical Society has been located in a large room in Auburn's Great Falls School, the former Edward Little High School, on High Street. A recent decision by the City Council to demolish part of the school is forcing the Society (MFGS) to find a new home, hopefully in the Lewiston-Auburn area. The new home needs to have room for the society's library of more than 2,500 books.

You can read more in Juliana ...

Wikipedia has great, although abbreviated, comparisons of nearly all the current genealogy software. The list of software is impressive. I thought I knew about all the programs available today but must admit I have not previously heard of HuMo-gen. The reports are split in two: one for client-based (Windows, Macintosh, UNIX, and Linux) programs and a separate report for web-based programs that are installed on a web server. All programs are listed by name, prices, and also have the most recent release dates. You might note that a few of these programs haven't been updated in years but ...

27 March, 2011 is Census Day in the U.K. when all residents need to answer a few questions about themselves and the people that share their household on that day. To complete the census form, either fill it out on paper and mail it back or visit The 2011 National Census online at http://www.census.gov.uk/

To mark Census Day, Ancestry.co.uk is letting you access all the web site's UK census record indexes, from England, Wales and Scotland, completely FREE, for 24 hours. To do so, you must sign up for the company's 14-day free trial.

You can learn more in an article by ...

The next episode of Who Do You Think You Are? broadcast in the U.S. will feature actor Steve Buscemi. Buscemi was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Dorothy, who worked as a hostess at Howard Johnson's, and John Buscemi, a sanitation worker and Korean War veteran. Buscemi's grandfather was a Sicilian  from the town of Menfi  in the south of Sicily, and his mother was Irish American. I suspect the TV show will dig a bit deeper into Buscemi's ancestry. Steve Buscemi has often portrayed criminals in his movies. This Friday, Who Do You Think You Are? searches ...

The following has nothing to do with genealogy but I consider it to be a neat gadget and thought that others might be interested.

There are dozens of methods of copying files from one computer to another, such as from your desktop to a laptop PC, or from your computer to your cousin's computer, or from your home computer to your office computer or vice versa. You could copy files to a floppy disk (if anyone still uses those) or to a CD disk or to a flash drive, then take that to the other system and copy the files to it. This is sometimes called "sneaker net" as you ...