I find this information in their August newsletter would be very helpful to many, especially of our new members.  The Fort Wayne Public Library is the greatest resource for Genealogy Research on this side of the Rocky Mountains.   Their newsletters are free (as well as access to their library).   Treasure Awaits: The Genealogy Center?s Digital Collections by Curt B. Witcher *************************************** Let?s take a quick look at the amazing collection of digital offerings from the Genealogy Center. www.GenealogyCenter.org When embarking on such a look, the first digital offering or collection to look at might surprise one at first. It's the library catalog! The online catalog is a collection of bibliographic records for the more than one million items in the Genealogy Center collection. Bibliographic records are records that describe the Center?s holdings of books, periodicals, microtext, and databases. Most library catalogs present a bit of a challenge for today?s users. Most of us are used to online search experiences that are truly more discovery-based, more like Amazon or Google. Most of us have grown used to search engines returning relevant results as well as such facets as ?Did you mean . . .? or ?You might also like . . .? No matter the library, most library catalogs don?t offer these user enhancements and frankly are not that intuitive to use. Nonetheless these catalog databases are vital tools we need to be using to determine what materials might benefit our research in a particular library. My persistent advice for those using library catalogs is to take time to play. The catalogs are all so different; they are all clumsy in their functionality and often in their layout; and yet they all hold the keys to unlocking family and local history resources their respective institutions contain. Try different search terms, even nonsensical ones, just to see what search results you get. Explore all facets and click on various links in the bibliographic records just to see how the feature may benefit your discovery. Indeed, explore for various features and facets that might both narrow and expand your searches. The Allen County Public Library catalog that contains the holdings for the Genealogy Center is relatively new, and still in need of a tremendous amount of development and refinement. When using it, focus on searching for surnames plus the word ?family? as well as geographic locations like cities, towns, and counties. Searching for an ethnic group of interest may also net meaningful results, particularly when marrying an ethnic group with a geographic location, e.g. Indiana Germans or Texas Swedes. Genealogy Center staff have put tens of thousands of links in our library catalog to free online resources. Any public domain materials in our collection that we have digitized through our partners have links to those digitized copies right in our catalog. For those items, the catalog tells you we have the compilation in question and it also provides you with a link to read the work online. Further, if we have five years of a yearbook digitized and cataloged, and we find twenty additional years online and available for free, we put those twenty links into our catalog as well. Truly you will be amazed at what you might find links to in our catalog. So the library catalog is a digital collection of bibliographic records that lets one know what can be explored while in the Genealogy Center as well as links to free resources available to explore online. When in the Genealogy Center using items described in our catalog, one then has access to another amazing digital collection--all of our licensed, on-site databases. There are twenty-three of these on-site databases including all the large database sites you have likely heard about and/or used in various venues. The major ones include Ancestry.com, America's GenealogyBank, AmericanAncestors.org, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage. Also in the Ancestry.com family of databases, Fold3, a largely military collection of records and images, and Newspapers.com are available for use. Another large newspaper database available for use in the Center is NewspaperArchive.com. It features newspapers covering all fifty states in the U.S. and forty-seven other countries from the 1600s to current. There are a substantial number of African American databases as well as Native American and Jewish data files. A third very large digital collection of the Genealogy Center are all of our freely accessible databases. Top among these is our ?Periodical Source Index,? or PERSI. More than three million subject entries are searchable for free 24-7.  These subject entries can lead one to unique materials and information found in tens of thousands of newsletters and journals. Other free databases include collections of family histories and manuscripts as well as copies of family Bibles; local history databases and resources for Allen County, Indiana, and the rest of the United States; and special gateways for those researching African American and Native American ancestors. There are another four million records and images in this section of our free databases to complement the more than three million PERSI entries. Truly treasures abound in the digital collections of the Genealogy Center. Come experience and explore these resources available to help you find your families? stories. Hoosierly yours, James G. Hermsen8108 Laura Lynne LaneIndianapolis, IN 46217 317-679-1466 cell317-881-4600 land line