Recently, I've been learning quite a bit about what some other projects have been doing, including many projects which use teams to help get their members involved in working together. So many of them seem like excellent ideas that we need to make some choices on where to start.
One idea that is working well in a number of other projects is an introductory team that teaches members how to use sources of particular interest to the project. The England Project seems to have started this with their Orphan Trail team.
Most project seem to do this by having a new member on the team work through searching for specific sources to go with a profile that has been orphaned (has no profile manager). A more experienced member of the project serves as a mentor during the process. After finding the sources, the new member writes at least a basic biography for the profile using the sources found.
To do this, we would need at least three things:
1) someone to coordinate the work of the team
2) some instructional materials on how to use major research tools for Denmark, and
3) some people willing to serve as mentors.
As a first step in looking at the feasibility of this idea, I created some categories to hold orphaned profiles that looked to me to have enough information in them to be good candidates for finding associated
i) church records - Category: Denmark PIT - Church Records
ii) census records - Category: Denmark PIT - Census.
PIT in these category names stands for Profile Improvement Team so that once new members are familiar with how to use the major sources, they could volunteer to work on improving some profiles (including their own families) in areas like adding sources, adding categories (especially sogne categories and maintenance categories indicating what additional work is needed), and adding biographies.
I'm guessing we could find already developed materials that introduce new users to searching for Danish Church Records and Danish Census records.
So what we would need the most to get this started is an idea of who would be interested in helping mentor new researchers and who would be interested in going through the learning process and then working on improving some profiles. And don't forget, we will also need a volunteer to shepherd this new team.
So who is interested?
Mary Jensen
Project Denmark coordinator