If you BUILD it, they will come.

Our Iroquois County Genealogical Society office is in a 2-room vault in the old county courthouse, so we sometimes keep the doors (steel-reinforced?) nearly shut to better control the temperature. There is a sign, "Come In. Doors are shut to conserve the heat (or cool)."

One small section of original record books

A few days ago, the doors parted and I heard a first-time visitor say, "Wow! I've found the treasure chest right here!" We really do have an impressive collection, and we still have the record books used over 100 years ago all around us.

Would you like more people to know about your Society, your Historical Museum or your Family History journey? So many people spend time online researching or learning. If you have activities or resources that can answer someone's research needs, it helps to get the word out. You have to BUILD that online presence.

I will be speaking on this topic at the annual meeting of the Iroquois County Historical Society at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. The meeting is just outside those vault doors in the old Iroquois County Courthouse, 103 West Cherry Street, Watseka, IL.

We are the Iroquois County Genealogical Society. We are on Facebook. We have a Rootsweb page. Here are three more ways we are BUILDing our online presence.

• We are BUILDing an online library catalog of the family histories and reference books we have. Maybe we have something that will help in your research. You may come to visit. It is the ICGS.Illinois LibraryThing. Free to BUILD and use.
• We are BUILDing interest in the activities and resources we have in Genealogy with this blog,  Searching Genealogy in ... Iroquois County, Illinois, and we include helpful hints on researching your family history. Free to BUILD and use.
• I am BUILDing a Pinterest board entitled Genealogy-Iroquois County-Illinois where I pin items of genealogical interest for Iroquois County. Free to BUILD and use.

These are definitely works in progress, but that just means we are still BUILDing our following, and we are working to get more people through those vault doors.

If you BUILD it, they will come.

ICGS.Illinois on The LibraryThing - National Library Week 2015

The week of April 12-17, 2015 was National Library Week, so I spent a few hours in the Iroquois County Genealogical Society library entering more books from our collection into our LibraryThing online catalog (https://www.librarything.com/profile/ICGS.Illinois). I first wrote about our library in this earlier post.

Many of these new additions include histories of counties in Illinois and booklets in honor of community centennial celebrations. There are many more bookshelves to go, so you can continue to return to our LibraryThing to see our new additions.

A few book tags on ICGS LibraryThing

If you don't have the direct link to our LibraryThing site, you can find the ICGS LibraryThing listings directly from the LibraryThing home page (http://www.librarything.com/ or https://www.librarything.com/).

On the LibraryThing home page, look at the top right corner of the page. You will see a Search site box to the far right of the brown bar. Click on the search magnifying glass, right below the word Help.

Now you can choose what you are searching, from Works (book titles) to Authors to Publishers. To search for our library, from the left column, click Members.

Enter ICGS.Illinois in the Search LibraryThing box and click the search magnifying glass. The results list will include ICGS.Illinois (Iroquois County Genealogical Society, Watseka, Illinois, USA).

Click on the link and you will see our Profile page. Read through our page to learn more about our Society. When I wrote this blog post, we had 880 books and family histories entered. You can also link to web page on Rootsweb, our Facebook page and this Searching Genealogy in...Iroquois County, Illinois blog. When you are ready to check out our books, click the Your library link next to Collections. You can browse through books or use the Search this library box to check for specific works.

There are many options available for viewing and searching collections on The LibraryThing. Explore and enjoy!

If you have any questions or comments, please click Comments below. Thanks for reading!

So many books, so little time!

In my first post on this blog, I wrote a brief summary of the types of records and resources we have in the ICGS archives. As I looked back at that post today, it was really brief. That's why this blog is so important. There is so much to tell.

Our "Genealogy Office" has a room that just fascinates me. If you ask Mary (she's in the office every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday), she will tell you that I always have been amazed in this room. It is full of BOOKS, hundreds of them! I want people to know about them.

A personal story I have to share: When I was at the University of Illinois, I used to go to the undergraduate library to study. Many days I would spend more time browsing the bookshelves than studying my books. After all, at that time, I was in part of the largest public university library in the country. Now, the Association of Research Libraries statistics for academic libraries in 2007-2008 shows Harvard University Library in first place with 16,832,952 volumes and University of Illinois in second place with 13,158,748. So many books, so little time!

For a few months, I have wanted to get a list of our books online. We don't circulate these books, but you should know what we have. There's no time like the present. Thanks to the constant updating of our computer records by Deb, time on Friday with Ginny and the computer, my past experience with databases and a little luck, we exported, then I imported 853 book titles into the online library site called LibraryThing. Our member name is ICGS.Illinois.

You can link directly to our Library at
 http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ICGS.Illinois.
This is definitely a work in progress, but book titles and most copyrights are listed. Tags (those words that help in searching and categorizing stuff) are in the entry, but not showing at this moment. Just one of those mysteries of technology I love so much. Authors should be showing, too, but aren't. Hmmm?

I guess I could have waited until it was tweaked to let you know this was available, but I just couldn't hold back. We have 853 books listed online!! As a former colleague used to say, "Whooo hoooo!"

Check out ICGS.Illinois on LibraryThing. Just saying, "So many books, so little time!"