GENUKI Home page GENUKI Contents GENUKI
Contents 		  How GENUKI is organised How Genuki
is organised

GENUKI Server standards

Introduction

Why do we need standards for the organization and presentation of material on this set of servers when the philosophy of the Internet is to "do your own thing"? The answer to that is that if we adopt a set of standards that are not overly restrictive but nevertheless effective, then we can collectively produce a distributed information service with a common "look and feel" on a set of servers distributed across a number of host computers. This will be a major benefit to users as they will be easily able to find the same sort of information about different geographical areas. It will reduce the task of those hosting pages that are being edited by others, will enable us to more easily produce software to automate such features as indexing and statistics, and should also make it easy to move pages between hosts when the need arises. It will also provide a mechanism, that we hope will never be needed, to handle devolved servers where the maintainer provides unacceptable information.

The basic logical structuring scheme we have adopted, which is taken directly from the proven scheme developed over the years by the LDS Family History Library, is described in the page How the information on this server is presented to the user. Being essentially hierarchical in form, it provides a convenient means for organizing the cooperative provision of a coherent and easily navigable service, using a number of different servers, each associated with a particular geographical locality, or with a particular subject topic associated with a given locality. Thus, as long as we agree on and adhere to a common set of conventions regarding content and layout, we can cooperatively provide a very large and almost indefinitely scalable information service.

There will of course remain the "problem" that our service contains a growing number of links to other information services on the Web that have been designed in totally different ways. Though we should try where possible to assist users to cope with the complications provided by such inconsistencies, there will be severe limits to what can be done - but at least our aim should be to allow users to remain largely unaware of the devolved administration and provision of the UK&I service itself.

In what follows we have for convenience formulated the standards assuming that the person producing pages of information for the service is also hosting those pages on his or her own server. However many of the conventions are also relevant to people who are producing html pages which they then hand over to someone else to place on his/her server.

HTML features to avoid

HTML standards are continually evolving, with new features constantly being added. But the real world always lags behind these developments, and many of our users do not run the latest browsers. We must therefore strike balance between using modern features with their formatting capabilities and sticking to the older one that most browsers can handle. We don't want to use only features that the prehistoric browsers can handle, but we must also avoid the leading edge developments which cause our readers problems.

Features to be currently avoided are:

Policy

The development of the World Wide Web has spawned a number of very innovative and attractive new methods of information retrieval which we hope to benefit from. Perhaps unavoidably it has also led to a lot of people creating services which ignore useful lessons learned over the years by librarians and information specialists as to how to present large bodies of information in usable ways - a trap which we wish to avoid. However it is very early days yet for the World Wide Web, leave alone this UK&I Genealogy Service, so we expect the methods, tools and conventions that we have used to date in designing this service to develop and change.

We therefore need a collective decision-making scheme regarding the evolution of standards for this service. The simple one we have adopted is that policy, e.g. on the format and layout of the pages, and their location, will be decided by a majority decision of the maintainers of the UK&I WWW pages.

Acceptable Information

Evidently, the service is intended just for genealogy-related information - all of which (other than a minimal amount providing links to the rest of the world, so to speak) should be of relevance to the British Isles. There is no obvious definition of the term "genealogy-related". A rule of thumb though is that if the information, or something like it, is in the LDS Family History Library then it is appropriate for this service.

Needless to say, we must ensure that copyright restrictions are properly adhered to. Information that is known to be subject to copyright restrictions should not be incorporated in this information service without prior clearance from the copyright owners, and the inclusion of appropriate statements about ownership.

David Hawgood has made available copies of documents on Copyright for Family Historians and Computer Copyright for Family Historians.

The situation regarding the reproduction of much Crown copyright material, such as census records, has recently changed. The Crown now waives "its copyright in Crown copyright material in public records that are available to the public and that were unpublished when they were transferred to the PRO. This means that such material can be copied, indexed, transcribed, published and broadcast without formal permission, payment of a copyright fee or acknowledgement of copyright. The change affects not only public records in the PRO but also those in all places of deposit outside the PRO, the National Archives of Scotland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Material in private copyright, published Crown copyright material, and non-public records are all unaffected". For further information see the National Archives guidelines on Copyright.

Information Formats

In general we expect most of the information held by the service to be in the form of text, either in html or ascii form. Graphics are acceptable, providing they are, so to speak, worth the storage space they consume (a judgement then can be made independently for each server). However, it is good practice to warn readers if a link is to a large graphic (e.g. by indicating its size in kbytes), and/or to provide a small "thumbnail" version of the graphic in the form of a button.

Where, on grounds of storage economy, it is desired to hold information in compressed form, then we suggest that you use the following methods of compression and archiving:

The zip format is probably the most widely known format and provides both archiving and compression via a single program. The use of "tar" files seems to intimidate most DOS users and is therefore less preferable. They do also need to be separately compressed and here the gzip program is to be preferred as there are no copyright/patent issues concerning it and it gives better compression than the compress program.

If compression would not result in significant storage economy then please try to present the data as a text file as it makes it much easier for the user to use, and in some cases e.g. a browse only service with no data storage, when the user would be unable to access a compressed archive.

New users tend to have problems with any form of compression or archiving, so if you have a link to such a file, then also add a link to the page that explains ftp, compression etc. E.g.

[ <A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/org/ftp.html">ftp</A> ]

Information Accuracy

Evidently we would like all the information in this service to be accurate and up to date. In practice, we will often have to leave the judgement on such issues to the readers - information sources and dates should therefore be indicated wherever appropriate and possible.

For information items which are particularly likely to need updating, it is best to state such information just once, ideally in a separate page, and if necessary have multiple links to that page. For example, society contact addresses should ideally be given just in a page that also gives general information about the society - a page that the society or its nominee is responsible for updating. (However to use a separate page when all one has is an address is excessive. And there are a number of files, e.g. transcribed library leaflets, that we want to include in their entirety even though they contain information such as addresses which might be less up to date than other versions of such information elsewhere in the server - the partial "solution" is to make sure to indicate the date such a leaflet was printed, or copied onto a server.)

Bibliographic citations should be not only accurate but also as complete as possible - in the case of books, it is useful to include ISBN information. (If there are many potentially relevant references that might be cited in some given topic area, try to choose the best and most up to date ones - and perhaps provide a capsule summary or review of the each item chosen in order to indicate the reasons for its inclusion.)

The standards we adhere to for our transcriptions are explained in our Statement of Copyright and Accuracy.

Data Protection Act

When providing new information please take care to ensure that we do not infringe anybody's copyright or put up information that they do not want to be publically available. You also need to be aware that what we are providing is a general public service which differs in concept from the normal one of using a computer at home for personal genealogy. If we include information on our pages about people who are still living we could be infringing the Data Protection Act, whilst it is perfectly within the act to hold such information for personal research at home. (For example, as a rule of thumb we try to avoid transcriptions of records, other than of burials, dating from later than 1900.)

Additional information is available in "The Data Protection Act and genealogists", one of several online Information Leaflets provided by the Society of Genealogists.

Logical and Physical Structure

As mentioned earlier the logical structure of the service is defined in the page How this Service is Organized;. Please do not introduce new topic terms unilaterally, and take care to position information at the most appropriate locality level, and in the right locality context. In general this should be fairly obvious. (However, for convenience, since there are a large number of sources that relate to England & Wales, but not also Scotland or Ireland, we have so far chosen to list such information under just the England heading, rather than under the British Isles - and to put an appropriate explanatory note on the Wales page.)

In case of doubt, try to follow the LDS Family History Library's practices. (For example, this provides the authority for the decision to limit the parishes that will be listed in and linked from the London page to those that are situated within the City of London, thus leaving Chelsea and Westminster parishes, for instance to be listed under Middlesex.) However make appropriate use of "See also" and "See under" links where it is anticipated that confusion could arise.

Where significant information on a particular topic is to be found elsewhere in the service (e.g. within a transcribed information leaflet from the PRO or some other archive) provide a link under the relevant topic heading, at the appropriate locality level, as well as the link to the whole leaflet (e.g. from the page describing the archive).

The physical structure of the service involves having separate pages for each locality - though introducing such pages for towns and parishes only as needed. Separate pages are also used for information on a given topic when this information is more than, say, a paragraph in length.

With regard to pages held on a given server, all those relating to a particular country, county, or town/parish are held in a directory related to that country, county, or town/parish. The opening page for each country, county, or town/parish is held in a file usually called index.html. This depends on the WWW server software running on the machine holding your pages. On Unix machines the default page loaded when you just specify just a directory name is index.html.

Each Town/Parish page should be the default file (index.html on most servers) in its own directory which should be a sub-directory of the county directory. The directory name should be the town/parish name in full (omitting spaces and with the first character of each word capitalized), eg http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/SOM/NetherStowey/index.html (links can omit "index.html"). Having a separate directory for each town/parish provides a convenient location for any other material relating to that parish, and adopting the standardised naming arrangement and directory structure described allows automated facilities such as the searchable Census Place Database to readily find and provide a link to the page.

Layout and content of the pages

At the top of each page we have a set of standard buttons which are there so that users can move quickly around the levels in the logical hierarchy and point them back to the upper levels if they have entered one of our pages through a "back door" such as from a link found by a search engine. Further information is given in the Buttons section.

Country, county, and town/parish pages typically start with an introductory paragraph (a nice touch is to use a quote from, say, an 18th or 19th century text). A maximum of 200 words for such a quote keeps it to a manageable size and prevents subsequent information being visible only by scrolling down the page. Enclose the quotation in quotation marks and then in <BLOCKQUOTE> ... </BLOCKQUOTE> bracketing as otherwise some users do not realise it is a quote.

Country and county pages then have an alphabetized list of links to their counties and towns/parishes for which information is available, respectively. See the Parish Listings section for more information.

This list is followed by appropriately-headed paragraphs, in alphabetical order, on particular topics. These paragraphs are meant to be informative in themselves, though should be brief, and can contain links to pages providing more detailed information where this is available.

There is a prescribed list of headings to use which are taken from the subject headings in the LDS library catalogue. It may seem a little restrictive to impose this but it has been produced by librarians cataloguing what is probably the largest Family History Library in the world.

It is not possible to be so prescriptive regarding the layout and content of topic pages. However, as the service evolves, so we may find it appropriate to try to formulate conventions concerning certain standard topics that occur in many localities.

The standard convention in bibliographic citations is to italicize the name of a book or of a journal.

URLs and local directory structures

GENUKI Branding

(Please note that most of the code snippets in this and the following sections are incorporated into the Parish Template page which we provide to assist in the provision of new parish pages. This template contains commented-out code for many of the standard items, e.g. topic headings, that may be needed as information is added to a parish page. It is designed for use with text editors, or with web page editors that enable existing pages to be imported, and their HTML viewed and edited directly. See: HTML Editors.)

[Some current browsers, such as IE5, complicate the process of saving files to your hard-disc by modifying files saved using the usual "File .. Save As" method. If this is causes problems when attempting to download the source HTML of the Parish Template, you can instead download a zipped version of the this Template.]

When we first started GENUKI, there were very few genealogy pages on the net, and all the UK ones were part of GENUKI. Nowadays there are many genealogy pages, and frequently users come into GENUKI via a link from some other page, and do not realise that they have arrived at a GENUKI page. We therefore need to make users realise that the information that they find so useful has been provided by GENUKI, not by the person who wrote the page they started on.

An important part of this "branding" process, is to ensure that your pages closely follow the GENUKI "look and feel", which these standards define. There are other techniques which we can also use to subtly shout "GENUKI" to the viewer. A standard icon or logo has been provided both for branding purposes and as a link to the GENUKI Home Page - this should appear at the top left of every GENUKI page: 

<BODY>
<A NAME="top"></A>
<A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk">
<IMG ALIGN="LEFT" HSPACE=10 SRC="/images/GenukiLogo.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI Home Page" WIDTH=96 HEIGHT=78></A>
We can also amend the <TITLE> tag at the top of the page to label each page as: 
<HEAD>
<TITLE>GENUKI: page title</TITLE>
</HEAD>
and add the ALT="GENUKI Contents" attribute to the image we use for the contents page link in the standard buttons at the top of each page.

Finally, <META> tags can be used in the HEAD section of the county and parish pages ie between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. As well as branding, these will enable search engines to display a sensible summary of the page contents and the page's position in the overall GENUKI hierarchy: 

<HEAD>
<TITLE>GENUKI: Ancoats</TITLE>
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Genealogical research information about
Ancoats, Lancashire, England.">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="GENUKI, England, Lancashire, Ancoats">
</HEAD>

Buttons

Icons give the pages a much more sophisticated look but have a disadvantage in slowing down access to the information, and not all readers can use them. Therefore do not add in lots of icons just to make the pages pretty. Just stick to the use of the standard GENUKI button-bar icons.

The standard location for icons is the images directory of the server, so that is a good place to put them. Alternatively create an images directory subservient to your genuki directory to hold them. They can thus be easily identified by indexing/logging software. It is important to keep the images on the same server as your pages, otherwise loading times can be significantly increased as a connection to more than one machine must be set up. Use identical images from the same location on a particular server as caching means that they only need to be fetched once.

Apart from the Logo mentioned under "Branding" above, there are four standard icons at the top of country and county pages (described later), and two on Towns, Parishes and other pages. The first pair is common to all pages that have buttons at the top.

The first button is an "Up arrow" gif which links you up a level in the hierarchy with appropriate text to tell you where you are going. The second is "Contents" which links to the main index file. The HTML for these is thus (this is an example of what would be on a Lancashire parish page): 

<BODY>

<TABLE BORDER=0><TR>
<TD><A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk">
<IMG ALIGN="LEFT" HSPACE=10 SRC="/images/GenukiLogo.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI Home Page" WIDTH=96 HEIGHT=78></A>
<TD><A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/archiv.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI Contents" WIDTH=34 HEIGHT=32></A>
<TD><A
HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/">GENUKI
Contents</A>
<TD>&nbsp;
<TD><A HREF="../">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/u_arrow.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI: Lancashire" WIDTH=30 HEIGHT=29><>Lancashire</A>
</TABLE>
In this example copies of the icons are held locally in a central image directory. If you are storing them in space provided by an ISP then you are likely to have to have your own personal images directory and if its at the top level of your personal tree you access it like "/your_userid/images/u_arrow.gif"

The <ALT=> attributes on each icon provide text to display if the user's WWW browser does not display images. The text against each image also does that, so it can be argued that we don't need the <ALT=> attributes. However a lot of browsers now use this tag to display a hint when the mouse is moved over the image, and so the text here helps improve the usability of the service. It is also essential for partially sighted users who use screen readers to view our pages.

Other images should be used very sparingly on GENUKI pages. Any present should also use the <ALT=> attribute to provide descriptive text. You should bear in mind the size of any images. They may load quickly when testing on your own machine, but if somebody is loading them down a slow network line it may take longer to load than they think is worth waiting for.

Indexing within pages

In general we try to avoid excessively long pages, or to do much linking within pages. When pages get bigger than a typical (smallish) display screen it will be useful to have pointers within the page to get to the major sections without having to scroll. The standard ones in country and county pages are to have labels at the top of the page, at the start of Towns and Parishes and at the start of information common to the country/county. The additional two buttons at the top of country/county pages are there so that you can easily get to these sections within the page without scrolling and with minimal mouse movement.

It has been found that to ensure alignment on different browsers, window and font sizes that it is necessary to use tables to line everything up - as in the second example above. The set of buttons for the top of such a page are therefore as follows: 

<BODY>
<A NAME="top"></A>
<A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk">
<IMG ALIGN="LEFT" HSPACE=10 SRC="/images/GenukiLogo.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI Home Page" WIDTH=96 HEIGHT=78></A>
<TABLE BORDER=0><TR>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="../">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/u_arrow.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI: England" WIDTH=30 HEIGHT=29></A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="../">England</A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM">&nbsp;
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/archiv.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="GENUKI Contents" WIDTH=34 HEIGHT=32></A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A
HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/">Contents</A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM">&nbsp;
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="#Towns">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/go_to.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="Towns and Parishes Index" WIDTH=34 HEIGHT=33></A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="#Towns">Lancashire<BR>Towns &
Parishes</A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM">&nbsp;
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="#common">
<IMG ALIGN="BOTTOM" SRC="/images/d_point.gif" BORDER=0
ALT="Table of Contents for this page" WIDTH=32 HEIGHT=32></A>
<TD VALIGN="BOTTOM"><A HREF="#common">Information related<BR>to
all of Lancashire</A>
</TABLE>

Note that this requires labels of Towns and common being placed at the "Towns and Parishes", and "Information related to all of ..." headings respectively.

The location of the GENUKI main index, /contents/ has varied over time. You may have links to the old locations on your pages that still actually work due to redirection on the machines at Manchester. However this will not work indefinitely, so if you come across one of the old URLs, then replace it with http://www.genuki.org.uk/contents/

As the number of subject headings increases on the page it becomes useful to add anchors to each of these and place a table of links to them immediately after the "Information related to all of ..." heading. For example: 

<H3><A NAME="common">INFORMATION RELATED TO ALL OF LANCASHIRE</A></H3>

<TABLE BORDER=0 WIDTH="100%"><TR>
<TD VALIGN="TOP" WIDTH="50%">
<A HREF="#Archives">Archives and Libraries</A><BR>
<A HREF="#ChurchRecords">Church Records</A><BR>
<A HREF="#CivilRegistration">Civil Registration</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Directories">Directories</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Genealogy">Genealogy</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Historical Geography">Historical Geography</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Manors">Manors</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Maps">Maps</A><BR>
<TD VALIGN="TOP">
<A HREF="#MilitaryRecords">Military Records</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Newspapers">Newspapers</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Occupations">Occupations</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Probate">Probate Records</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Societies">Societies</A><BR>
<A HREF="#Taxation">Taxation</A><BR>
<A HREF="#VotingRegisters">Voting Registers</A>
</TABLE>

<H4><A NAME="Archives">Archives and Libraries</A></H4>

Parish Listings

Every county should have an alphabetic list of parishes which can act as links to parish pages as and when these are created.

There is no well-known and standard way of grouping a county's parishes together. (The way parishes are/were grouped into Deaneries and Hundreds is not familiar to many users, and particularly over the last hundred years or so town and village boundaries have grown and changed considerably.) Our county pages, as they develop, therefore need to link essentially directly to large numbers of parish pages, otherwise users will not be able to find them.

Although it does not reduce the number of such links on a county page, we have introduced a convention, based on that used in the Phillimore Atlas and Index of Parish Registers of indicating parishes that were already part of a significant town a century or so ago. This is done by indenting them and prefacing them with the town name. This town name can then serve as a link to a town page, on which there can be additional links to the parishes.

This apart, we in general try to avoid listing large number of towns and other conurbations on the county pages, since most of these have become of significance only relatively recently. However, the inclusion of a modest number of "See" and "See also" references amongst the list of parish names is reasonable, when it is felt that this will help users.

Given that in almost all cases the list of parishes will be lengthy, the parish names can be grouped under their initial letters. An initial set of links to these groups can be provided, together with links jumping back to the start of the alphabetic listing. Particularly lengthy lists can be moved from the county page to a separate page which is linked from the "Towns and Parishes" icon on the county page button bar. (For a good example of the use of these various conventions, see the Northumberland page.)

Heading sizes

There will always be number of views on what looks best, but <H3> for major headings and <H4> for subject headings seems to stand out adequately but at the same time getting the maximum information on a page without scrolling.

Identification of page author

After all the work involved in setting up pages the author should get some recognition. It is therefore quite acceptable to put your name at the bottom of the pages you have produced. Users may also want to contact you about the page and so an error reporting mechanism should be provided.

It has been found to be extremely useful to have a "page last changed" date at the bottom of the page. It is used when preparing indexes and can also be useful in identifying when a printed copy was taken. The code used is normally of the form: 

<P>
<center><I>[Last updated 5 Nov 1996 - Brian Randell]</I></center>

If you are hosting a set of pages on some company's or organisation's machine then it is also useful to put an acknowledgement of that at the top of the tree you are hosting. It will make them feel happier about hosting it and a link to their home page can usually be put in without increasing the amount of text.

The information providers at the country and county levels are listed on http://www.genuki.org.uk/org/providers.html. This contains the names of these people and a link to either their home page or their email address. You may find it useful to have a link to your personal home page there so that you can put any appropriate text between you and your email address to fend off genealogy junk mail. And as a thankyou for maintaining a section of GENUKI if you have personal research interests such as your own family tree there, then you have indirectly linked it to GENUKI.

HTML Editors

Many of our maintainers edit their pages at the HTML level using a simple text editor such as "Notepad", but if you wish to use a purpose built HTML editor instead, please be cautious in your choice. Not many of the web page editors in common use are in our opinion at all suitable for maintaining GENUKI pages. Several of them change the boilerplate markup we use for our button bars and tables of contents. A surprising number of them produce very verbose, idiosyncratic (and often invalid) HTML, and make it very difficult to adhere to the very simple HTML that we deliberately restrict ourselves to using, or to match the visual appearance of GENUKI pages. Several maintainers recommend "Hot Metal Pro" for PC users - apparently it offers all the usual tags and shortcuts while leaving the user in control. For the Mac, BBEdit is said to offer much the same facilities.

Your HTML can be checked using the validator provided by the World Wide Web Consortium at http://validator.w3.org/, but this, of course, does not check for compliance with GENUKI standards.

Errors and Corrections

Phil Stringer regularly runs his link-checking GENUKI Spider and produces a report listing link errors.

A user may notify you of an error by personal e-mail, on the genukiwww Mailing List or through our automated Error Reporting system.

Please address all reported link-errors as soon as possible - dead links reflect badly on all of us. Occasionally the software mentioned above may generate false error reports, but every reported error should be checked thoroughly before being dismissed as a false report. Links should always be checked on live web pages, not on copies held on your computer - a link may work on your machine but not on the web server! Also you may have two links to the same resource on a given page, one correct and one incorrect. Then, when notified of the error, you might check the good link and immediately dismiss the report as incorrect - this is a surprisingly common reason for bad links remaining uncorrected.

How GENUKI maintainers keep in contact

There is a maintainers email list of which all county page maintainers should be members. It is there to provide a mechanism for announcing changes which affect maintainers, to enable discussion of proposed changes and to disseminate any other GENUKI related information. This list is maintained by Phil Stringer.

FHS addresses

We earlier discussed the need to keep frequently changing information in just one place to ease maintenance and also to avoid old information being inadvertently left on a page. A good example of this is Family History Society addresses where we could easily alienate societies if we have out of date contact information on our pages. The FFHS now provides us with a list of contacts for all societies in the Federation. This covers nearly all English and Welsh societies. These lists are currently maintained by Brian Pears and can be accessed via http://www.genuki.org.uk/Societies/ Each entry can be accessed via the individual NAME= label attached to each entry. Therefore each society is represented by a link to its entry on the common Societies page.

The Societies page then has links to the individual society's home page if it has one. You may ask why the entry on the county page does not point directly to the society's home page. This is because the scheme is a necessary compromise whereby the county entry can access the common Societies page with the official society address and links are also provided to society home pages from a single point. E.g. 

<A HREF="http://www.genuki.org.uk/Societies/#England.html#anchor1852015">
Manchester &amp; Lancs FHS</A>

A similar scheme can be used to provide the address of local Register Offices from the lists maintained by Peter Abbott at http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/RegOffice/

Devolving nodes in the tree

Nodes in the tree will continue to be devolved to separate servers as more information becomes available and maintainers either run out of space or maintenance effort. If you find somebody to take on and to host part of the work indicate to them the amount of work which may be involved and get them to agree to abide by the standards we have all agreed to observe. If they still wish to take part the maintainer of the higher node in the tree will need to be informed to make any required changes to links.

A "Job Vacancy" page exists at http://www.genuki.org.uk/org/helpus.html which gives some information about what is involved and who to contact.

What to do if you can no longer host information

In the event that you are no longer able to host information for whatever reason, being a job change or other interests then let the rest of the group know as soon as possible either by email to the whole list or to the node above you in the tree. We will then have the maximum amount of time to move the data to another site, adjust all the relevant links, and to find somebody else who is willing to take over the job.

How to change these standards

On occasions a GENUKI Developer might wish to propose a change in the GENUKI standards. The following notes are intended to provide guidelines on how this should take place and how the discussions should be conducted.

Note that this does not fully specify what would happen if a discussion led to two or more irreconcilable views on the best way ahead. In this case it might be necessary for any proposal to specify these different views and for the members of the GENUKI mailing list to vote for their preferred option. To prevent two options ending up with the same number of votes it is recommended that a single-transferable vote would be used so that voters would specify their favoured option, 2nd favoured etc.

We expect people on the list to act fairly and responsibly, having respect for other people's views.

Valid HTML 4.0! Info Find help, report problems, and contribute information.

[Page maintained by Phil Stringer, last updated Tuesday, 23-Oct-2007 08:53:01 BST - RRL]