Ra ra ra!

If you are reading this in bed, be careful – this edition contains sporting activity.

Digging for victory

If you want all the latest dirt on the London Olympic Games in 2012 – the scandals, the overspends, the displacement of rare species – don’t bother looking at London 2012. This is the official website for the games; all it needs is some pompoms and a short skirt to be the perfect cheerleader.

All of which does not make it all bad. No, really! There is a lot of interesting stuff here. They are at the stage of finding intriguing things as they dig up the sites of the various Olympic venues. Maybe I’m just sad, but I do like reading about the practical stuff, how many concrete columns they’ve built and what the Olympic Village will look like.

Obviously the sections on things like ticketing and the use of IT are sketchy and "aspirational" – that is, with fingers tightly crossed. There is a blog, with contributions from schoolchildren doing Olympic-related projects (no sneer intended – it’s a great "handle" for these projects) and official stuff from Uncle Seb and the team.

You can find a huge number of websites eager to knock the London Olympics – BBC London has a plentiful supply of pursed-lips coverage – but if you want the good news, brightly presented, look no further.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Sport & recreation". London 2012 is a Key Link.)

Get up and go – where?

It’s probably too late to start a training regime which will get you a place in the team for 2012, but if your aims are more modest, Active Places could help. This site is maintained by Sport England, and "allows you to search for sports facilities any where in England by a number of different ways". Terrible grammar, but you know what they mean.

You can search by location, by particular sport, or go "freestyle", which means drifting around an interactive map until you find something that interests you.
The search engine found me 7 athletics tracks within 5 miles of my front door. Drat – no excuse there, then!

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Sport & recreation". Active Places is under "Sports clubs & facilities".)

Picture credit: taliesin/morguefile.com

Record review

One way to stop people looking at your records is to keep moving them around. The government has applied this principle to public records over the years, shifting them around London and the provinces, not always leaving a forwarding address.

I suppose they were bound to tire eventually. Lots of physical records have now been collected in a bunker in Kew…

Catch it before it moves

The National Archives Centre is the aforementioned bunker, and is also a rather nice website – as long as you have a clear head. At first sight, it’s all a bit bewildering – links going off in all directions, events, how-to guides, latest document releases… etc., etc.

If you are looking for particular documents or guidance, expect to spend a bit of time getting acclimatised. Look to the left for Family History and Military History. Look in the middle for what’s new. For a bit of fun which is educational as well, look down the page for the Online Exhibitions.

I looked at the one about public information films – short films telling us all how to live our lives, often funny but not always intentionally! Fascinating stuff. (If you are using a Westminster Libraries computer, you may have problems viewing the actual film clips – the technology will catch up, but don’t hold your breath!)

There has been some controversy about family records being moved to Kew and disappearing from public view. So if the vast amount of online material doesn’t satisfy your hunger, check that the printed stuff is accessible before making a special trip to Kew.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Family history". National Archives is a Key Link.)

Get the gen

Who has ever searched for a name on the Internet without the website Genuki popping up? Genuki, in the words of its promoters, aims "to serve as a ‘virtual reference library’ of genealogical information that is of particular relevance to the UK & Ireland."

"It is" (they continue) "a noncommercial service, provided by an ever-growing group of volunteers in cooperation with the Federation of Family History Societies and a number of its member societies." So you get the picture: lots of keen types, beavering away at finding family history information, and then sharing it with everyone else.

There’s a huge amount of help and encouragement here. As I may have observed before, this is the sort of thing that the Internet is so good at.

(From the Gateway to websites, select "Family history". Genuki is a Key Link.)



picture credit: yarekcl/morguefile.com