Research Roundup: Audio and Video
Today’s research roundup is about collecting and processing your audio and video files. While the process of rounding up digital media files is easy yet sometimes tedious, rounding up hard copy media files can be difficult and expensive. You’ll have to make decisions about what files to convert so you can store them digitally and what files to continue to save in their original format.
Digital Files
Rounding up your digital media files is a matter of finding them on your computer or other devices and storing them all in one place. FHnotebook provides a simple framework for you to store your media files, and you can organize them into family-specific notebooks.
Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Tasks
FHnotebook has a great feature called “Tasks To Do.” Often while you are researching, you get interrupted or need to take a break. FHnotebook allows you to create a task so you can remember where you were when you come back to your research. This way, you don’t repeat research or forget to do an important task.
Tasks To Do also gives you a place to put all of your ideas. If you think of something to research, but now is not the time, add a task. When you put items somewhere you will remember to do them, like in your FHnotebook organized with your research, your mind can focus on your current work.
Read more about the simple process of adding a task to your FHnotebook in our user guide. You can even add categories to your tasks so you can easily find them, the same way you categorize documents or photos.
Family history research is confusing as it is. If you create a task system for yourself, you will be able to be more efficient and organized as you research. You will be able to keep track of what you’ve done with your documents, photos, and videos, and you’ll be able to keep track of what you still need to do through the tasks you create.
Say you are researching your grandmother’s aunt. You could create a category called “Aunt Gloria” so that all tasks associated with her could be easily grouped together in FHnotebook.
The tasks associated with Aunt Gloria can then be tracked and marked as complete when you finish them. This way, you know what work you have left to do concerning Aunt Gloria.
You can add as many categories as you want to each task. The task, “Find Aunt Gloria’s birth certificate” is also categorized under “Records to find,” so that when I am at the family history library doing research, I can be sure to have a comprehensive list of the tasks I need to do there.
However you choose to use Tasks To Do, make sure you use it! It will provide structure and purpose to your research.
Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Collecting Pictures, Audio, and Video
I struggle to keep track of my digital photo albums. Right now I have hundreds of pictures stored on a jump drive in my closet, a stack of printed photos on my bookshelf, and even more pictures on my 3-year-old laptop—the laptop that probably won’t make it much longer. So, I need a safer place to store my photos. I also need one place to put them all. And even better—a way to categorize each picture so I know who is in it! I am good at labeling folders on my computer, but I have a hard time remembering specifics, such as where I put that picture of the family reunion. (Was it in “Winter 2010”? Or “Family Albums”?)
FHnotebook solves ALL of these problems. You can store and backup all of your photos on our secure servers. Because of this, you can also access your photos from a laptop, your smartphone, tablet, or desktop. And you can keep adding pictures to your FHnotebook. Once you reach your 100 files, upgrade to our Hobbyist plan, which lets you store 1,000 files. And our Genealogist plan gives you 20Gb of storage, or 4,000 files!
Using FHmedia to Collect Pictures
I love knowing exactly where all my digital photos are. But what about my printed photos? Easy: the FHmedia app allows you to scan photographs and documents so you can store them securely with all of your other photos. You can still keep the printed copy, too, for peace of mind. In the app, you can choose the “take a new photo” option or the “scan a document” option. On iOS devices, the scanner has a grid to make it easier to scan documents and end up with straight images. Using FHmedia is great because I can take a photo and immediately upload it onto my FHnotebook. I can even leave a date stamp in the notes section so I know exactly when I took the photo.
Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Sharing
Your family history research has taken you hours of searching and collecting; why wouldn't you want to share it with others? With FHnotebook you can share your research with friends, family, and fellow researchers. When you share an item with others, they can see and add to what you've accomplished. You can share entire notebooks, individual documents, and tasks.
Here are a few specific scenarios where sharing could be useful for you:
Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Categories
In the last post I explained how to set up some notebooks to help you organize your family history research in your FHnotebook account. Today I’m going to explain how you can use another FHnotebook feature, categories, to help you find what you need even more easily.
Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Notebooks
Before you can use your Family History Notebook account to store pieces of your family story, you’ll need to set up some notebooks in your account. Notebooks act as containers for the records, photos, videos, audio recordings, and tasks you put in FHnotebook. Each notebook has a name, so they’re easy to use for organizing your research.