[Last update 7 June 1997 
 - Jean Suplick Matuson, project coordinator, webmaster@chartiers.com]

Thanks for your interest in the obituary abstracting project.

The goal of this project is to provide, on a monthly basis, a group of 
obituary abstracts from current obituaries appearing in the on-line version
of the Washington Observer-Reporter newspaper.  

Currently, the newspaper does not archive their electronic version of the 
obituaries, and as of April 1997 they had no fixed plans to do so.  
Since the obituaries are already in electronic format (that is, computer files
rather than paper), it seems a shame to lose those files when they could 
be saved for genealogical purposes.

The obituaries appear on the newspaper's web site for only one or two days 
and then they are removed.  It is very important that we capture them on a daily 
basis as they appear.

Okay, so let me suggest an approach to getting started. 

The two major tasks we're confronting are:

   1.  Assuring that obits and funeral notices are captured each and every day.
   2.  Abstracting the obits, which is more time consuming, but can be done at
       leisure.

Volunteers will take shifts of 1 week at a time.  Weeks will run from Sunday 
through Saturday.  A volunteer's responsibility will be to capture the obituaries 
and death notices each day off the http://www.orplus.net web site and save them in 
a text file on their home computer.
 
Then, when the volunteer has time, they will abstract the obituaries according the
template we provide.  When they're done with their abstracting, they will email the
finished text file to the project coordinator who will collect them and post them
in bundles for each month.

The template with instructions and the schedule for volunteers can be found at 
http://www.chartiers.com/worobits/index.html.

Many, many thanks to all those who have participated in this effort!