The Internet Archive

This article from the Genealogy's Star blog talks about the large amount of material available to genealogists on the Internet Archive.

Free people of color in Louisiana

Louisiana State University has put online a collection of letters, records, and public documents from Lousiana pertaining to free black people from from the colonial period to beyond the Civil War. The link to the article from Daily World and the archive itself is here.  
Thanks to ResearchBuzz for letting us know.

This article, published at theverge.com, talks about how the Web has made genealogical research accessible to the average citizen and transformed the way it is done. The article also looks at the history of ancestry.com,  the role of the Mormon church and its Family History Library, and the use of DNA analysis in genealogy. It's close to being an ad for Ancestry, but has a lot of interesting information.

April Fools Day

Here are some April Fools pranks from the past, courtesy of  the Genealogy Insider blog at familytreemagazine.com

The Genealogy Gophers website allows you to search 40,000 genealogy books for free.  The results are from genealogy books only and include the title of the book where the information is found, and a portion of the text including your search term. We learned about this from GeneaPress.com, via ResearchBuzz.

Grave marker photo contest

Its March, and BillionGraves is offering those who aren't basketball fans an alternative to March Madness: a billiongraves-march-madness-competition. Prizes will be awarded for participants willing to take a large amount of gravestone photos, or produce a lot of transcriptions.

Thanks to GeneaMusings and ResearchBuzz for letting us know.
Also from BillionGraves:  a place to go to request headstone photos.

Hernando County Newspapers

As you probably know, the Hernando Today ceased publishing at the end of November. They kindly donated to the library bound copies of the paper covering the period January 1986-June 2013.  They are available at the Main branch at 238 Howell Avenue, in downtown Brooksville. Also donated were microfilm copies of the paper for the period 2010-2014. These are located at the West Hernando branch.
In addition, the library holds old Brooksville newspapers on microfilm. These include a small number from the 1920's, most of the 1930's, and then just about everything up to the final edition of Daily Sun-Journal, published on June 17th, 1992. This microfilm is located at the West Hernando branch, along with a limited number of editions of the New York Times- a few months of each year from 1856-1963, and reels covering all of 1979 and 1980.