Hi Listers. Vikki is here. She has not gone away although I have been up to my you-know-what in alligators. :) First I would want to say that I took over the Berkshire County site from Laurel O'Donnell, who was a great coordinator and she was a stickler for copyright violations. More so than I am, although I hope to avoid using any information that would harm another person or their hard work. The copyright language was written by Laurel when she ran the site. My understanding of copyright law (I'm not a lawyer) is that anything written or designed prior to 1923 is in the public domain. Vital records are always in the public domain. But you have to be careful about using Transcriptions of Vital Records. For example if I spent months extracting a transcription from public records and typing it up and publishing it in a book, I would be horrified if I found that a year later someone had copied my book and published it online. Now if the vital records were transcribed again, by someone else, and published it would be a new work. The US GenWeb Project is devoted to posting free genealogical records online. One of the constant conflicts that we have that will not be resolved regards all the genealogical transcriptions that the local history societies have. They have the records but they don't want to post them online because they want to sell their books. Which is their right until their copyright expires. <Sigh> so here we are. It is actually a moot point because I don't have access to the book to post anyway. HOWEVER all you nimble fingered researchers out there are always welcome to transcribe data and send it to me for posting. I have recently re-organized the site so that most information is listed under the individual towns. Some of you said that the navigating the site was confusing. Hopefully it is better now. But now we need new material! So please send in your submissions and I will get them posted. Old letters, transcriptions of old yearbooks, census records, VITAL records, local history indices, you-name-it. It is your site so feel free to submit data. Thanks, Vikki Gray, Berkshire Co GenWeb Coordinator