We are seeking volunteers to fill vacancies that have arisen for county page developers in GENUKI, the UK & Ireland Genealogical information service, particularly but not solely in Scotland. GENUKI is widely regarded as the premier on-line source for information about UK genealogy—it now contains more than 30,000 pages, occupying over 450 megabytes of information, and over fifty people (many of whom have further helpers) are involved in its maintenance.

The counties concerned are:

ENGLAND—Berkshire, London, Middlesex, Shropshire, Somerset, Surrey

SCOTLAND—Banffshire, Berwickshire, Bute, Dunbartonshire, Dumfriesshire, Kincardineshire, Midlothian, Moray, Nairnshire, Peebles-shire, Renfrewshire, Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, Shetland, Stirlingshire, Sutherland, West Lothian

WALES—Merionethshire, Monmouthshire

The main requirements of county page volunteers are threefold:

1. Either considerable experience of family research in the specific area(s), or local knowledge and contacts within the area.
2. The ability to create simple HTML pages directly and also maintain them (including a basic understanding of HTML, directory structure management, and FTP).
3. Lots of enthusiasm!

The work involved in taking responsibility for a county page is described at www.genuki.org.uk/org/guide.html. The amount of work that county page developers do varies considerably, and is of course governed by the amount of time they have available, the extent to which they can enlist the help of others—as indeed many have successfully done - and the level of ambition that they set for their pages. This is of course influenced by what other volunteers are managing elsewhere on their GENUKI county and parish pages—many of which have become rather impressive! However, we are keen to get to the stage where all the rest of our counties have at least basic information pages for all of their parishes.

I'd be happy to try and answer any queries from potential volunteers for the above counties—and would also encourage people interested in helping with any of the other counties to contact the respective county page maintainer directly. (His/her name is to be found via the link to GENUKI maintainers near the foot of the GENUKI main page, www.genuki.org.uk/.)

Anyone interested in helping with the Ireland section of GENUKI, which also has a number of vacancies, is invited to contact Richard White at white@hiwaay.net.

Cheers
Brian Randell

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