Volunteer

How Can You Participate?

One thing COGenWeb volunteers have in common is a desire to share valuable genealogical and historical information with others. Being an COGenWeb volunteer may be done on several different levels.

County Coordinators (CC)

The county coordinators are the foundation of the COGenWeb. Our CCs manage and maintain the county web sites. Our CCs come from different backgrounds, are all ages, and live where there is access to the internet. The only prerequisites to volunteering as a CC in Colorado is to have a sincere interest in the genealogy of the county you coordinate and the ability to use basic HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to maintain a website. Our volunteers provide basic assistance to researchers, locate & transcribe data, and format data submitted by other contributors.

If you are interested in adopting a County Coordinator, please contact the State Coordinator.

Information Gathering

Our volunteers provide basic assistance to researchers, by locating information, researching in public records, transcribing data, and providing images.

If you are interested in gathering information for a county, please contact particular County Coordinator. If you are interested in gathering information for the state, overall counties, please contact the State Coordinator.

You can walk your local cemetery photographing and recording the names and dates from the headstones. Sometimes volunteers also note the location (plot/gravesite) of each headstone. The CC and the Tombstone Project Coordinator will be happy to post your contributions.

Special Projects

We have several Special Projects in the works that can use some help. Take a look at the items below, and you may find some of interest.

• We have a need for volunteers to obtain old photographs of places or of people.
• We especially have a need for people that can do translations of documents written in other languages into English.
• We have a need for Transcribers for The Census Project, Tombstone Project, and the Digital Archives Project.

Guidelines

• First off, it is important to remember that we are all volunteers here. Being a volunteer means that that you will not be paid or expect payment for what you do. All information that has been put onto the COGenWeb pages is done by volunteers. As volunteers, we are in no way compensated for the work we do, other than the "Thank you's" we receive from people we have been able to help.

• We welcome members of Historical and/or Genealogical Societies that wish to host a County in the COGenWeb Project. As always, links to from your Genealogical or Historical Society are permitted and encouraged.

• As volunteers for the COGenWeb Project, we adhere to a strict code of conduct in our dealings with the public and with each other. We refrain from using any profanity on our web pages, in our emails, or on any list we may be on.We do not promote pornography in any way. We do not use derogatory statements at any time. If we have a problem with anyone, we try to be as polite as possible, whether dealing with the public or with another volunteer. Whenever we have problems that cannot be resolved, we go to the SC or an ASC for assistance.

• When you volunteer to coordinate a county for any of the State Projects within the USGenWeb, you do so knowing it is for the USGenWeb Projects, and the many visitors to that county. The USGenWeb Standards and Guidelines for your county pages. COGenWeb can and does, impose additional guidelines. To volunteer to coordinate a County in the COGenWeb, it must be with the understanding that you will adhere to all the requirements and guidelines. Please visit The USGenWeb's Volunteer Support section for more details.

• Don't get overwhelmed! When you first adopt a county, the "rules and reg's" can seem a bit daunting. On this page, we are outlining what our requirements are, but don't let the length of the page scare you. There is more description here than requirements!

• As a COGenWeb volunteer, you must be a member of our state mailing list. This list is a closed one, which means the SC (or ASC) will have to subscribe you to the list. We use gmail for our Coordinators Mail List. You do not have to have a gmail email address to be a member and participate on this list.

• We offer free hosting on our server to COGenWeb County Coordinators. As the owner of your web site, you have the option of establishing your web site on any server. Project web sites are hosted by a variety of servers, many of them free of charge. Contact our State Coordinator about what options are available to you. If you are changing an existing web site, check with our State Coordinator about what our state guidelines are regarding removing any currently posted information.

• Rebecca Maloney recommends using Expression Web 4 to edit webpages and CORE ftp LE to upload and download pages. She can help you learn both of the programs and they are offered to download free. Betty Baker offers a template to use.

• One of our approved COGenWeb logos must be prominently placed on your home page. I recommend the logo be used as a link directly back to the COGenWeb index page.

• One of the approved USGenWeb Project logos must be prominently placed on your home page. I recommend the logo be used as a link directly back to https://usgenweb.org.

• Graphics must be in the standard formats, .gif, .jpg (.jpeg), .png, so that all browsers can view them.

• County Coordinator's name and email address must be prominently placed on your home page. We suggest that you put a short paragraph of introduction at or near the top of your index page.

• You should be courteous, quick to respond and assist your visitors to the best of your ability. You aren't required to do research for your visitors, but you do need to provide them with some direction for finding answers.

• You can include a method of contacting the SC or ASC (their names and email addresses displayed with text or use a text image.

• Each county site should have a link to USGenWeb Special Projects at https://usgenweb.org/about/projects.html

• Each county site should have a search engine for your site. There are several free ones that are easy to add, such as Freefind https://freefind.com

• You can include a Colorado outline map. You can find one on our Logos page, copy it, and highlight in your county.

• Your county pages should be updated on a regular basis and the updated date noted on the bottom of your pages (This page last updated on. . .). Link all major pages in your site to your index page. Additional linked pages may be accessed through your main pages. You can find JavaScript codes with automatic date updates to use at USGenWeb Project's Website Caretaking

• As new county pages are put up, and periodically, they will be checked by the State Coordinator or Assistant State Coordinator(s) for the required elements and to be sure your links work. If there are any problems, we let you know so you can make any changes or corrections that are needed. If the problems are not corrected in a reasonable time frame, you will be contacted again by the State Coordinator.

• Many of us came to the COGenWeb, or the USGenWeb, looking for our ancestors. Sometimes we are lucky enough to be able to adopt the very county we are researching. It is understandable that we would want to further our search for our own ancestors while coordinating that very county. However, please remember that our primary function as a County Coordinator is to find local data and format it in such a way as to be available to visiting researchers.

Prohibitions (Thou Shalt Nots!)

• The USGenWeb Projects, of which the COGenWeb Project is a part of, is a non-profit organization. We make  information available for FREE access by all, 24 hrs. a day, and 7 days a week. No one will be charged for any of the efforts by the CCs, as hosts to a county in the COGenWeb Project. If you should come across someone who is charging for access to their COGenWeb county page/s, the State Coordinator needs to be informed.

• There are to be no money requests posted. There should be no unnecessary advertisements (some servers require an ad on the site; they are considered necessary). There should be no requests for donations to help fund the costs of the page. There should be no requests for donations for the time you spend on the pages.

• If you have someone that does research, and charges a fee for services, please make sure there is a notation that the person is an independent researcher and not affiliated with USGenWeb nor COGenWeb. The above restrictions do not mean that you cannot ask for reimbursement for your out of pocket expenses, like copying & mailing fees, etc. The latter should be noted on the lookups page and not on the main page.

• No Profanity, pornography, nor political icons and statements, are allowed on any of our pages.

• Our goal is to provide free information but we must do it legally. No matter how tempting it is to upload useful data to our county pages, we must avoid copyright infringement. Copyright is ownership of the author, creator or publisher of a given work. Copyright gives the owner the right to benefit from his/her labor.
  To avoid copyright infringement, follow these four basic rules:
  Public records, such as cemetery transcriptions, vital records, school records, etc. are not copyrightable. However, the format in which they are presented can be copyrighted, so be careful.
  
  Any use of a work that diminishes its market value constitutes copyright infringement.
  
  Obtain written authorization from the copyright holder to avoid committing copyright infringement.
  Still in doubt? See USGenWeb's Copyright Information

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