Tumblr for Family History Societies and Libraries

I think Tumblr is a great platform for a blog. You can share enormous photos, links and news, and the format is large and easy to read. It's perfect for a family historian who doesn't want to do a lot of writing, or only occasionally.

Here is an example of a Tumblr blog (mine):

If you click on the picture you will go to my Tumblr blog.


What does this have to do with family history?

Now this is a personal blog and it's not just about genealogy, so I need you to use your imagination a bit. Imagine you can

• share a few pictures of historic photos or documents
• tell a few stories about what you have in your collection
• tell stories about what other researchers have found to solve their research problems
• explain what your society does
• have a link over on the side to let people know where you are and how they can join

The way Tumblr works, and the reason it is so popular and easy to deal with, is that what you share takes centre stage. Pictures are not tiny little things that you have to click on to get a bigger image; it's right there in all its glory.

You can also reblog the posts of other people, to create more interest, although I wouldn't go overboard with this. There is someone on Tumblr called librarianista who shares magnificent photos of libraries (and cafes near libraries, such as the one above). There are historic photos and retro fashion photos, all of which can add interest to a family history society blog, to encourage people to think about the context of the ancestors' lives.

The more popular blog sites are Blogger and Wordpress, and these are the best if you want a lot of control over the layout of the words and smaller pictures within the text. This blog, for example, is written in Wordpress.

The advantage of Tumblr is its ease of use and the fantastic way it displays images. They are BIG. Images are what get people in, no matter what the post, but if the blog is mostly images people will stay and look, and keep looking. And that's what you want.


What, share all our photos for free???

I have heard the argument many times from family history societies - why would we give away our images for free on a blog? I am not proposing you put everything up there. Just a sample is enough. After all, you are not going to attract people to the society to see the photos you have if no one knows they are there.
Once you have a blog, you need to link it to your society website, and vice versa. The point of a blog for a society or library, in the end, is to get people interested enough to go to the website for more information, and perhaps to join.

This post was inspired by this post at Mashable about using Tumblr for non-profits. Whenever I see
something about 'non-profits' I think 'societies'. You can read the post at http://mashable.com/2011/09/16/tumblr-non-profits/.


POSTSCRIPT
After writing this post I came over all enthusiastic and created a new blog on Tumblr called Social Media and Genealogy http://socialmediagen.tumblr.com/ to demonstrate a bit of what I am talking about. It's more for family historians than societies, but it may give you a better idea of what such a blog could look like than the ones that are there now.

[This post was previously published on 17th September 2011 on my Social Media and Genealogy blog.