I agree with Mary, LOOKUP is a classification used to offer Lookups. Then a researcher, by limiting there search to the Lookup classification, could quickly determine what sources were being offered for lookups either on a surname board or a locality board and then request help from the appropiate person. I suppose the looked up response would automatically carry the same classification as the message it was responding to, but maybe there are cases when this would not be advisable. Otherwise why not post a query with a title "LOOKUP REQUEST: Source title" and see what response you might get. However now that I think of it why couldn't this request be classified LOOKUP? So now how about a query like this? LOOKUP OBIT: Need to find obit for Sally Jones who died 1/25/06. How do you classify this? <grin> Since this seems to be so confusing I would suggest having better instructions places somewhere readily available <grin> for those who will bother to read them. James R. Davis, Sacramento, CA -----Original Message----- From: boards-admins-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:boards-admins-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Mary D. Taffet Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 3:37 PM To: boards-admins@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [BAd] What's the Point of the Classification Feature? Jackie, Clearly there is more than one opinion on what LOOKUP means. I always thought, and several others concurred, that LOOKUP was reserved for those who were offering to do lookups for others from some source available to them. In other words, this would be BEFORE any lookup was ever done. Joan has a different interpretation which you have quoted below. Teri's interpretation is probably more in line with what I thought to be the case. -- Mary On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Jackie Wilson Goddard wrote: > Teri, > > I truly beg to differ. As Joan said in an earlier post in this thread (to be specific: > http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/BOARDS-ADMINS/2006-08/1156871165 > ) "LOOKUP has a limited usage for replies to queries that quote data from a variety of sources." > > 1. These posts are "replies to queries". > 2. They "quote data". > 3. The data is from "a variety of sources". > > If LOOKUP is not "the results of doing lookups", what is your definition? > > Jackie ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to BOARDS-ADMINS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Hi folks, I have been watching the developments of boards from the beginning. First there were collections of messages on specialized web pages, then boards were developed to allow groupings, threads, and more global indexing and all messages were Queries. One of the grouping types was like data types on specialized data storage areas. Then to facilitate the aggregation of data, Classifications were created where data miners could store their mined data for all the rest of us to see. So we got classifications such as Obits, Cemteries or Tombstones, Census data or other types of data. These were only to post data not ask questions or give responses. IMHO Board facilitators should be watching for this and changing the classification of all messages that are not strictly single type data posts taken from specified source materiels to the classification of Query. Then the message boards wanted to incorporate the idea that some locality web sites offered which was Lookups. The problem is how to do this, so a classification of LOOKUP was created. Now we have forgotten or some newbies never knew what this term meant or how this term was used and how it works or maybe now we just want to redefine it. I think LOOKUP is just another data classification and the data is "Sources that someone has offered to do lookups in." When you ask for a lookup or give a response to a lookup request it should be a Query. This way the data set of sources being offered for searches under the classification of LOOKUP is not overwhelmed in an advanced search with the subsequent queries about the data. If you want to research this I have all the copies of RootsWeb Review back to June 1998 and I am sure buried in all these documents may be found references to LOOKUP. James R. Davis, Sacramento, CA