by AGS member Michael A. Blackledge
In Part I, we noted that AGS member James Roy Lee and his wife Kathleen tell an important story of the Armenian massacres in general and their families specifically. The Higgins and Lee Family Story is in the ABC Library system. Whenever you donate a book to our Genealogy Center, Lisa Kendrick, the Genealogy Librarian for the Public Library of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County, will enter it into WorldCat which provides the book’s metadata to other libraries and researchers. Currently our Genealogy Center is the only one holding a physical copy of James’ book.
Besides donating it to other genealogy libraries or societies, are there ways to distribute it? Consider:
Archive.org
Libraries are not interested in digital copies. When I offered my tome as PDF on a CD to Allen County Public Library, the response was that they would print it from the CD, and send me a copy, and keep a copy for themselves. I declined. My book is 3,340 pages, and this was not the response I wanted.
If your goal is to “distribute as widely as possible,”consider Internet Archive, my favorite non-profit. Their mission is “universal access to all knowledge.” You gotta love that. Visit archive.org and start a free account. Then you can upload whatever you want for the public to access. Hint: The name of the first file you upload defines the URL for your item, so think about that and keep it short. Archive.org will create a simple URL for your item, which can consist of anything digital you can think of like jpegs, PDFs, Word docs, movies.
Here is a link to my favorites on archive.org. Do you see the item My Life as A Fool? A high school classmate’s autobiography. Archive.org is a technique to publish digitally for free and with public access that will be available forever. The system will take your uploaded PDF file and convert it to a flip-page book, with full text search capability. All AGS publications are on archive.org and also marked as one of my faves. You could also create an item of all your research material, notes, images – a complete collection, as much as you wanted. I did this here.
IngramSpark
Did you purchase our AGS Golden Anniversary book The First Fifty Years? It is available now at a website near you! The AGS Book Committee conducted an evaluation of publishing houses based on cost and quality and we chose IngramSpark, with a publishing facility outside of Nashville. You might consider publishing your book via a print-on-demand service such as IngramSpark. You’ve already done all the work. This last step is relatively easy! You can view the AGS book offering in our Genealogy Center or here.
My suggestion: if you wish to distribute your family history, create an account and investigate your publishing options with an on-line publisher such as IngramSpark. There is no financial cost to you to investigate and initiate this first step. If you decide to publish, I suggest using an ISBN. You have AGS colleagues such as Molly Shannon and Stu Murray who can explain and help with that.
Why would you want to do this? You can get a copy into the Library of Congress. This will assist future researchers plus capture your legacy work.
