Mark Tucker, a mild mannered software architect by day, becomes a family historian and blogger in his free time.  At ThinkGenealogy he writes about everything from the intersection of genealogy and technology to sourcing and citation and provides fun and interesting family history related insights and the occasional puzzle.

Thanks Mark.  We’d love to repeat, so we’ll see what we can come up with this year.

Some of the information in the collection has been on the site for a while, but this week we released two important additions, an interactive USS Arizona Memorial Wall and over 8 million Hero Pages created from U.S. Army enlistment records.

Some of the other titles in the collection include:

• Pearl Harbor Muster Rolls
• Missing Air Crew Reports
• U.S. Air Force Photos
• Submarine Patrol Reports
• Japanese Air Target Analysis
• Army JAG Case Files
• Navy JAG Case Files
• Naval Press Clippings
• Allied Military Conferences

You can read the full press release here, or begin exploring the collection here.

When we opened our doors in January of 2007 we had fewer than 5 million images on the site. Since then we’ve added 2 million images a month and have made improvements to the site. Today you can access more than 42 million images on Footnote. Along the way, we’ve worked hard to keep our costs down and subscriptions affordable.

With challenging economic conditions, the time has come to make a modest adjustment to our subscription fees.

Starting September 1, 2008, the monthly All-Access Membership price will be $11.95 and the annual All-Access Membership will be $69.95 (an additional 83 cents per month for annual members).

To help with the transition to the new prices, we’re inviting users to upgrade to an Annual All-Access Membership at the current price of $59.95.

To purchase an Annual All-Access Membership, go to: http://www.footnote.com/account. This special upgrade offer expires August 31, 2008.

We believe that at these prices, a Footnote membership continues to be a great value and a low-cost alternative to traveling to an archive to access the same records. We hope you agree.

We appreciate your support and feedback and look forward to continuing to serve you.

Best regards,

Russ Wilding

CEO, Footnote

“… all that history is, is just a collection of people and their stories, and this seems to be that connection.”

Listen to the segment here:

Or, you can also catch the interview on TV later tonight – don’t miss it.

Update: Read the transcript of the TV Program that was aired 23 May 2008.

When I was a kid, the last thing I wanted to do was go on vacation. We were a car-trip family, and my parents, both history buffs, threatened to stop at every historical marker, every museum, every small town with even a remote claim to fame. History was for old people, I thought, but more important, seeing these things simply wasn’t worth the time and effort. Times have changed, thanks to Footnote.com, which instantly brings history to your fingertips. It offers a great interface, a healthy dose of Web 2.0 technology, and a vast array of documents previously available only to those willing to sit at a microfilm reader.

Footnote.com’s motto says it all: “History for the People—Discover. Discuss. Connect. Share.” Its mission is to build an online community around history, using an amalgamation of the United States National Archives and social networking to foster contact between users who can download documents from the site and upload their own scanned content. The bare-bones idea is an innately good one, but what really makes it pop is the site’s partnership with the National Archives, which has allowed Footnote to digitize its entire collection—about 9 billion documents, many of which have previously been released only on microfilm. The site has set an ambitious goal of uploading 2 million new Archive documents per month; though it’s less than a year old, it already boasts 15 million documents.

That 15 million is a huge number, and I expected to find some great things tucked back in the corners of the site. I wasn’t let down, either. Some of my most interesting discoveries were advertisements for slaves (the idea continually baffles me), naturalization records for men who immigrated to Ellis Island on the same ship my great-grandpa Ruefenacht did, and handwritten notes from the Constitutional Convention. On the more entertaining side, you can peruse the many pages belonging to Project Bluebook, the government’s once-confidential UFO files—complete with enough redactions to keep even the most devoted conspiracy theorists intrigued for months.

INTERFACING WITH HISTORY

Granted, Footnote has an excellent vision backing it, but that wouldn’t matter if the interface couldn’t keep up. Luckily, the site features some of the best, most effective Flash I’ve seen. Whereas some photocentric sites have excruciatingly long load times, Footnote is remarkably quick, though larger scans still take a moment or two longer to resolve on-screen. On any document—all of which derive from scans of original documents—you have the option to rotate, spotlight, annotate, zoom, download, or print. I found these tools straightforward and comprehensible for users of all skill levels.

Spotlighting involves marking the document for Footnote’s Spotlight page, which highlights various documents that users think are especially interesting. Annotation involves marking a specific person, date, place, or text within a document, which automatically enters it into Footnote’s searchable database of terms. I found the annotations especially helpful because they let users input information on any document. It’s like Wikipedia in this sense; people are all free to contribute to each document’s information.

Footnote’s philosophy is that everyone has a “shoebox” full of miscellaneous items that will have value to someone. In keeping with this idea, a portion of the site’s material comes from everyday users. Some people have chosen to upload pages from their high-school yearbooks. Others have uploaded photos from World War II or even love letters written during the war. Imagine if you’d have been able to add this sort of stuff to that history term paper you wrote in high school, instead of just pulling dry-as-dust facts from an encyclopedia or two? Items are uploaded either through story pages, which include basic information about particular documents, or through a basic image uploader. You can find them both through your profile page, which catalogs your activity on the site.

Footnote has helpful features sprinkled throughout the site, but one of my favorites is the status bars by each group of documents. The tiny bar charts use percentage to indicate how complete each collection is. Many collections are at 100 percent, so that’s often a non-issue, but it’s definitely helpful for people who are searching for something specific that may not yet have been uploaded.

Scanning quality, for the most part, is excellent. The National Archives documents uploaded by Footnote are of first-rate quality, and no matter what magnification you zoom in to, the result is always clear and easy to read. But a few documents I really wanted to read, mostly ones scanned in by other users, were scanned at too low a resolution to look decent at any degree of zoom. Footnote currently doesn’t have any quality control; including some upload guidelines would be a good move.

Some features on Footnote are free, but you must pay a fee for downloading privileges. For $7.95 monthly or $59.95 annually, you get unlimited access to the site’s amenities; a free membership, naturally, gives you less. There’s enough free content for the site to be worthwhile, but if you spend much time there, you’ll soon find yourself wanting to upgrade.

The thing I love most about Footnote is the immediacy it gives to history. If I’d had a Web site like Footnote when I was a kid, I think I’d have a significantly better grasp of my country’s history. Seeing actual original documents like this is something no textbook can parallel. This is the sort of stuff that turns people into historians. Even though Footnote is still years away from its peak, information-wise, it’s already an invaluable site for researchers, genealogists, academics, or even the general Internet surfer with even a little curiosity about the past.

Link to original article: Site of the Week: Footnote.com

This second video is an interview by Dick Eastman, EOGN, with Beau Sharbrough, our Senior Director of Content Aquisition, about content on Footnote at the.

At that time (February 2007), users could subscribe to the site for $9.99 a month or $99 a year. Still skeptical, I wasn’t willing to pay for a year.

I was wrong.

Not only is Footnote.com surviving, it’s thriving. And when was the last time something got better – and cheaper – at the same time? The number of records online has grown consistently and the annual fee is down to $59. Those who paid $99 have received extensions.

Also, Utah-based connect magazine has a short piece in their June issue, which is not yet online:

Footnote.com is a history buff’s dream. The site has text-based search options and built-in social functionality allowing users to share comments and tag any document with notes.

Also check out their connectcast to listen into their discussion about Footnote.

Like most affiliate programs, website owners can put links to Footnote on their sites and when people visit the site, click those links, come to Footnote and buy, we share part of the subscription fees with the owner of the referring site.

We hope this program will help the right people find Footnote and help support other history and genealogy related websites.

For more information go to http://footnote.com/affiliates.

This new partnership will enable Footnote to digitize valuable documents that have never been available before on the internet. The first project through this partnership will be to digitize and release on Footnote.com the three million records in the Revolutionary War Pension Files. Details about this partnership and what this means to Footnote members can be found in the Footnote Press Room.

“For one thing, costs are prohibitive. Scanning alone on smaller items ranges from $6 to $9 for a 35-millimeter slide, to $7 to $11 a page for presidential papers, to $12 to $25 for poster-size pieces. (The cost of scanning an object can be a relatively minor part of the entire expense of digitizing and making an item accessible online.)”

For many there is a misunderstanding of just how little is currently available on the web:

“If researchers conclude that the only valuable records they need are those that are online they will be missing major parts of the story. And in some cases they will miss the story altogether.” – James J. Hastings, director of access programs at the National Archives.

We’re happy to see our efforts to digitize and give broader access to historical documents with NARA noted – and illustrated with a good-looking infographic: