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December 13, 2011 Meeting Notes

1. Welcomed Kay Mestad to meeting
2. Refamiliarize committee with adding new years to individual archives
3. Jay will meet with Linda and Marie at the MCPL when schedule permits
4. Jay will help Jim Rogers as needed for the process of adding the new years to his archives
5. Jim Rogers invited Kay over to his house to observe how he archives obituaries

February 10, 2009 Meeting Notes

1. Challenge our members by building backward and adding one year at a time to each communities obituaries.  I.E. Mason City has a gap between 1985 and 1995. 
2. Emiratis Members
3. Gene Manning
4. Build a historical archive
5. Progress of Osage and St. Ansgar
6. Assigning New Members
7. Kristin Kingston is now ready to transcribe obits
8. Ask Genie-Bug staff if they would add http://ncigs.org/ to the Genie Bug
9. Revisit Email addresses, make sure they work
10. Citizens National Bank, review if they wish to sponsor again.
11. APPOINTMENT:  St. Ansgar Enterprize Journal Loren will visit with Chuck Peterson, Friday Feb. 20, 10:00 am.  Question:  Would they email their obits and we'll publish them online -- possibly delay several months so as not to compete with the newspaper.
12. Needs more review.  Publishing a membership list online.  Surname index.  Jay Lehmann brought this up.  Consensus this idea needs to be watched, with a possibility for sometime in the future.
13. Marie Thompson and Loren Toomsen will meet to update her lap top.  Currently she is writing directly to the web.  Marie needs a current copy of the website on her laptop.

November 11, 2008 Committee Meeting

1. Gene Manning heading up a committee of two to approach First Citizens National Bank for a two-year renewal of hosting our N.C.I.G.S. website project.
    

2. Sending an obit committee member to become a member of the monthly N.C.I.G.S. Executive Committee to represent Obit Committee interests on the committee.
    

3. Brainstorm: Review ideas and suggestions to improve our obituary presentation on the internet.
    

4. Review our presentation on "Arachnophobia" at the November N.C.I.G.S. meeting.  How can we do it better in the future.  What equipment do we need to improve our presentations?
    

   • Do we need, or does the NCIGS need to invest in a computer projector to assist in future programs?

   • Wireless connection
      

5. Joys and Concerns
    

6. Create a non-published private webpage that contains all our passwords, etc. 

• March 13, 2008 Committee Meeting
   
  1. The old PAF-Ways website was renewed for one year.  The fact is in order to bring the obituaries over from the PAF-Ways site to the NCIGS site is going to require more time.  The cost to renew the site is $100.00 for a year, I charged it to my AmExp card.  I will visit with Bill Bjerke to request a check from our special fund.  This is part of those unknown expenses.  Yes, PAF-Ways folded, and yes we have given our assets to the NCIGS as we agreed, but part of PAF-Ways (the obituary project) is still in operation and is transitioning over to the NCIGS.  Hopefully we will not have any more of these – but that is why we have earmarked the account to cover events such as this.
      
  2. In order to allow prior year obituary updates to transfer over to NCIGS – we will create subwebs out of earlier years.  For example the year 2002 can be converted to a subweb.  Then a volunteer can bring over obituaries from the PAF-Ways site, publish to the NCIGS site without disturbing current work on a particular newspaper.  We’ll work those details out on an individual basis and make certain everyone is in sync before we proceed.  Bottom line – it may well take a year to bring over all the old obits currently on the PAF-Ways site.
      
  3. Jay Lehmann mentioned a feature he found in FrontPage that will help remove extraneous tables that come over when we copy obituaries.  I had never seen it, so I tested it when I got home today.  Jay is right.  Under “Table” / “Convert” / “Table to Text” the key removes the extraneous tables.  BUT – it also opened a door to MACROS.  MACROS are instructions we give to our computers to remember a sequence of repetitive keystrokes so we don’t have to feel like gerbils performing the same mindless keystroke combinations over and over.  It’s too early to crow, but my early work says:  “We can create a macro that runs the keystroke that invokes the Table to Text routine, then highlights the decedents name, bold faces it and sets its size to 14 point.
     
     Expect a review of creating Macros at our next meeting in March if this all actually works.
      
  4. Now that the forms are working on the NCIGS website Marie reports she has already received four Research Requests.  Some are junk, but we are going to analyze the submissions and then add several more lines to the form to focus our visitors requests away from general to specific.  It’s part of our high prices education.
      
  5. We decided to table setting up a Pay-Pal account until some future time when the society needs to address it.