Mr. Huffstutler,
From the perspective of a local public library I'd have to say that the interest in genealogy continues unabated.  We still get numerous researchers in our collection and requesting information from our materials.  Our difficulties have been more in the area of staff and opening hour reductions due to budget constraints.  Because of those, we are not helping as many people as we were once able to, more's the pity.  We still get boy scouts working on their genealogy merit badges and retirees doing that research they have always wanted to do.  We are also helped by having a large local history component.  Genealogy and Local History are, at least for us, two sides of the same coin.
We get some volunteers, but not nearly enough.  Most lose interest in us after a few hours of working on obit. indices or similar necessary but thankless tasks.  Unfortunately, it is difficult to train and oversee new volunteers when one does not have sufficient staff. And "exciting" projects can be difficult to come up with and supervise properly. 
Website maintenance is a big problem.  My admittedly unscientific take is that the bloom is off the rose and the reality of site maintenance has hit many organizations hard.  I think this is normal in many areas once the "new" wears off of something exciting.  In our case we would love to be able to digitize more records to put on our website if we could devote the staff hours and server space to them, which we cannot.  
I do not think the hobby has, "died out," but it is perhaps retrenching with the result being fewer web resources - although places like LVA are putting more and more of the collections online so that makes me liar!  Maybe it is a case of the internet still being a useful tool, but it has to be used in different ways than previously. Fewer "volunteer" sites and more "institutional" sites, perhaps?

George Combs

 


George K. Combs
Branch Manager
Special Collections
[http://www.alexandria.lib.va.us/] Alexandria Library
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717 Queen Street, Alexandria, VA 22314
Ph: 703-746-1719 Fax: 703-746-1720 

 

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