The Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG) is a cooperative effort among software companies, nonprofits, and experts to enable the consistent capturing, sharing, interoperability and preservation of family history metadata in digital media.
We don’t create new standards, we gather recommendations for how to implement them.
The Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG) has been developing a set of recommendations that digital medial platform developers can use to improve how they capture and store family history metadata using existing standards like IPTC or schema like XMP and EXIF.
The FHMWG board, comprised of representatives from founding member organizations, meets bi-weekly to set the goals and cadence of the work according to our roadmap. At each stage, members of the working group are called on to conduct research, deliberate, take action, make decisions, or do the work of drafting recommendations.
We do most of our work in a shared Google Drive Folder (request access). Our resultant recommendations are hosted in our GitHub repository. We organize our members and conversations about our work in our LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. Join us in these spaces to participate or send us an email at info@fhmwg.org.
The Information and Stories Associated with Billions of Valuable Captured Experiences are Destroyed or Lost Annually because:
The who and what depicted in the media was never recorded.
The information and story behind the depiction is disassociated from it.
Neither the information, the stories or the media were digitally preserved.
When the only people possessing this knowledge are lost to us, the knowledge is irretrievably lost with them. The Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG) is dedicated to solving this problem!
Watch our RootsTech Connect 2021 presentation to learn more about what we’re doing.
Enable the consistent capturing, sharing, interoperability and preservation of family history metadata through effective planning, standardization and frequent communications to archives, libraries, history organizations, standards bodies, commercial vendors and websites in order to establish, adopt, and promote this metadata.
We seek to enhance the value of digital media about people by refining the process and capability for storing and embedding metadata
Chair, Chris Desmond – MemoryWeb.me
Vice Chair, Rick Voight – Vivid-Pix.com
Secretary, Robert Friedman – Permanent.org
Gordon Clarke – FamilySearch International
Maureen Taylor – MaureenTaylor.com
Luther Tychonievich – FHISO.org
Joel Cannon – FHISO.org
Beth Ann Wiseman – FamilySearch International
Nancy Desmond – MemoryWeb.me
The Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG) has been developing a set of recommendations that digital medial platform developers can use to improve how they capture and store family history metadata using existing standards like IPTC or schema like XMP and EXIF.
The FHMWG board, comprised of representatives from founding member organizations, meets bi-weekly to set the goals and cadence of the work according to our roadmap. At each stage, members of the working group are called on to conduct research, deliberate, take action, make decisions, or do the work of drafting recommendations.
We do most of our work in a shared Google Drive Folder (request access). Our resultant recommendations are hosted in our GitHub repository. We organize our members and conversations about our work in our LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. Join us in these spaces to participate or send us an email at info@fhmwg.org.
Family History Metadata Working Group 