Joe Everett is the Family History, Local History, and Microforms Librarian at the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library. He has over 25 years combined experience in the genealogical field at BYU, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and Ancestry.com.

Joe manages the collections and patron services of the BYU Family History Library and serves as a faculty liaison to instructors in BYU's Family History undergraduate degree program and others involved in family history on campus from social to computer science.

At FamilySearch, Joe was a library program manager providing services for the more 5,000 family history centers. Previously at FamilySearch, he headed the International Reference floor at the Family History Library, and also worked for several years as a technical services librarian, cataloging Slavic and Germanic records. He has served on numerous strategic planning and program development teams at FamilySearch. At Ancestry.com, he worked in content acquisitions and content product and project management, putting genealogical databases online.

Joe earned a B.A. in Russian Language and in Family History/Genealogy (Germanic emphasis) from Brigham Young University and a Master of Library Science from Emporia State University (Kansas). He has been a member and officer in various library and genealogical associations and has lectured and published articles on U.S. and European family history research, historical geography, and migration.

28 August 2007

Google Sky: Wishes do Come True

Ever since Google Earth 1.0 came out, I have been a huge fan. And ever since then, I have thought, "Now if we could only zoom out to the sky and go explore the universe." Now we can! Google Earth 4.2 has a new feature that lets you zoom around the heavens in the same way that you explore the Earth. There are stunnnig pictures from the Hubble Telescope. You can zoom right into the middle of nebulae, galaxies, and get right up close to stars. It is absolutely awesome! I think I may be even more addicted to Google Sky than I am to Google Earth.

20 August 2007

Germanic Genealogy Society

GGS Home This society really has a strong, active membership, and a quality web site and quarterly publication, the Germanic Genealogy Journal.

17 August 2007

Ancestry.de

I have switched the link to the left from Ancestry.com to Ancestry.de, because I am working on the German Ancestry site, which launched in October 2006. I am the product manager for the databases on this site. So far, we have some pretty cool things on there, including the Hamburg Passenger Lists, censues from the former Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, old postcards and photos ofGerman cities and landscapes, lots of history books, and a growing collection of city directories and other historical address books.

Managing Requirements

Managing Requirements
This is a really great primer for product managers and one of their core functions: project requirements definition.