Using Digital Media Files for Genealogy
Using Digital Media Files for Genealogy Introduction A lot of people ask how best to handle digital media in their genealogy research. This blog post explains some of the benefits of using digital media, and highlights some important aspects to bear in mind. This blog post does not address how to best cite digital sources; that will be the topic of a future post. What is different about digital media? There are big differences between what you might call traditional paper sources (I will call these physical sources) and what most people predominantly use today: online digital sources. First, the physical sources exist, you can touch them. They don ’t disappear overnight (unless there is a fire). Digital sources can disappear overnight, they can be duplicated with no effort so may appear in many places at the same time, they are essentially ephemeral. Second, digital sources are either copies of physical sources that already exist, or they are databases that you