SOAR -  THE FUTURE

SOAR was demonstrated in the Genealogy workshop, in the Computer workshop, and at several presentations given by CIC during the AHSGR convention in Denver, CO in June, 2001. That provided possible volunteers an overview of what they would be expected to do and interested chapter/district councils an overview of what was available to them for virtually no cost. Several chapter representatives had a little problem understanding what free actually means. AHSGR purchased an unlimited license for the five year term of the contract with CIC to use the imaging and keyword indexing software package. This meant that any chapter could use this approximately $50,000 software package at no cost to them. For optimal usage and to have CIC provide on line support to the chapters, they had to buy two software packages at a cost of less than $500. That gave them seven day per week support from CIC. Training sessions were held at CIC in Greeley, CO on June 11 & 12, following the convention in Denver for volunteers and for interested chapters, who wish to avail themselves of the software purchased by AHSGR.

Instead of scanning and then manually indexing each individual obituary, we now use an auto optical character recognition (OCR) process in CIC headquarters, Greeley CO,  to scan (if copies are paper) or process directly electronic copies of obituaries received. The processed obituaries are placed in processing queues where volunteers, using an Internet connection and their home computer, verify or correct the OCR information and manually enter the birth, death, and publication information (as available in the obituary) into the record. The volunteers use software resident on CIC servers and the only download to the volunteer that occurs is the interface to that software. The volunteer selects files from their assigned queue, corrects the OCR results (as needed), enters the date information and then clicks a button to transmit the file to the server where it will be uploaded to the SOAR database that evening.

Volunteer computer requirements
Volunteer computer requirements are minimal. The software is currently not Mac compatible. Microsoft XP, Microsoft 2000 or Windows 7 operating systems and an Internet connection of cable or at least DSL (discrete subscriber line) for the interface to the remote operation. Problems are discussed with Marge Benson (by phone or e-mail) because she is the leader of that volunteer processing team. If Marge is unable to answer a question or solve a problem CIC will be contacted to provide help.  

How it works
We no longer paste obituaries onto file cards and manually process them as illustrated in many of the photos in this section. We receive and process obituaries sent to us electronically, scanned to a sheet of paper, or individual obituaries cut from a newspaper for the auto OCR process that is the first phase of the process. The files that have completed the OCR step are then available for the volunteers to review, edit and add the birth/death/publication date information from the obituaries. After you contact Marge Benson soarproject@ahsgr.org and indicate you are willing and able to help the team, you will be provided instructions how to log into the remote CIC server and also give a password and login ID for the software used. You will be provided ‘how to’ use that software to select, edit and process files you have been assigned. It is that simple.

Questions
Please contact Dennis Zitterkopf at zitter@cox.net or Marge Benson at soarproject@ahsgr.org or Lauren Brantner at lrbrantner@yahoo.com and we will do our best to answer your questions. If we can't we will find somebody that can

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