RootsTech 2025 - Day 3

Day 3 and the last day of the RootsTech 2025 Conference is over.  This was a light day for me, and I'm kind of glad because I am TIRED!! 

  * The first class of my day was Document Analysis: Digging into the Details by Angela Packer McGhie. Based on the principles in the book, Genealogy Standard, Angela used a great example and walked us through assessing the reliability and accuracy of documents we encounter in our research. 

  * My next class is one I was really excited to see, AI-Powered Transcription of Handwritten Documents: Tools and Techniques with Nicole Dyer.  This class was great!  It was all I hoped for and more.  As I have said several times over the last couple of days, I am wanting to used AI to transcribe documents I have in my possession in order to share those documents on my blog.  Nicole went over several platforms and Large Language Models (LLMs) to demonstrate how to use them. She also gave us tips on improving transcription accuracy, ideas for effective prompting techniques, and how to correct minor errors in the transcriptions.  Also, she didn't only go over handwritten documents; she used examples of printed documents as well. I use a lot of newspaper clippings on my blog, so this is just what I needed.  I am looking forward to trying out this tool in the next few days. 

  * My afternoon class was Learning to Use AI Tools: Taking Your Prompting Skills to the Next Level by Steve Little. Unfortunately this one did not go so well for me.  When I pulled up the video, it would not play, even after refreshing the page several times. Then the chat exploded because everyone was having the same problem. Eventually someone with FamilySearch entered the chat and said their engineers had been notified and were working on a solution.  After a couple more minutes, someone realized that if you went to the Storied class scheduled at the same time, it was actually Steve doing the above class!  So by the time I got over there, it was 15 minutes in, and I was pretty lost from there on out.  I will definitely have to re-watch this one from the beginning after the conference!  I will say that Steve was very enthusiastic and straightforward, so I am sure I will enjoy the class the second time around.

  * My 5 p.m. class got rescheduled to midnight tonight (um, tomorrow morning). So I guess I'll be doing another RootsTech post tomorrow.  

  * The last thing I watched today was the RootsTech 2025 - General Session 1 - Rachel Platten and Steve Rockwood.  This was a replay of the Keynote from the Day 1 of RootsTech.  Of course, I loved Christa Cowan's talk, though I had heard most of it in her class. I was disappointed that Rachel Platten wasn't there in person, but the video worked great, and she was very sweet.  The father and daughter singing duo are amazingly talented, and their voices were so pure and sweet.  Overall, it was a good start (or in my case, end) to the conference.