Saturday, November 15, 2008

Are you a Greenie Genie?

I am trying to cut down on paper use in everyday life. I store all of my documents and photos on a hard drive and back them up to DVD. I never print emails and don't even have a printer installed on my little Eee PC. My calendar and contacts are online and synched between a couple of devices.

But what of my Genealogy hobby? I have a bookshelf full of folders with bits of paper I have collected over the years and I am wondering how much of this stuff is essential. I must go through the folders and prune down the contents. I will keep primary documents and copies of certificates but will scan anything else I need to keep.

In the future:

* When visiting repositories I will eschew the photocopiers and microfilm printers. I will use a USB flash drive to save data where possible on reader/printers, I will use the digital camera I have in my handbag to take digital images (on a high resolution) of book and journal pages and microfilm printer screens.
* I will resist printing out reports that others send me. I do find it hard to transcribe details and continually change windows when transcribing details from databases on one computer. I now set up two laptops and use one for viewing/browsing and one for data entry.
* I won't print off hard copy backups of genealogy reports. I will save these to an offsite location. An easy way to do this is to attach documents to an email and send them to a web-based email account like Gmail.

Maybe I'll even save a tree. I'm interested in tips from Greenie Genies

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