Ending of Rootstech 2011 in Salt Lake City

This initial Rootstech Conference was a first of its kind and was very well attended. It was a joint effort by many sponsors such as Ancestry.com, Family Search, BrightSolid, Microsoft, and Dell to pull together members of the genealogy community and the software techies in order to get a greater understanding of the need for both to work together for the greater good.

I was able to attend programs on the great features of Google, document preservation, and new inovative software. There was so much brought to the forefront by each of the opening speakers my head almost ached from trying to store it all.

I am looking forward to the second Rootstech Conference right here in the Salt Palace on February 2-4, 2012. What has been learned from this experience will be used to make the second conference much better.

I have been told this conference attracted a number of attendees in excess of 3,000. The Expo Hall was crowded wall to wall when classes were not in session.

One speaker which really made me sit up and take notice was Mr. Brewster Kahle the Digital Librarian for Internet Archives in San Francisco. His presentation told of the wildly high numbers of bytes of stored data, images, and video at Internet Archives. It was almost beyond mental comprehension.

Just as the day was drawing to a close several of my friends joined me in the Expo Hall to discuss some of the things we had absorbed. In this photo above is Alvie Davidson, Drew Smith, Kim Harrison, and Lou Szucs of Ancestry.Com.