An Interview with Frederick Wertz, Director of Digital Services at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society
The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B) was founded in 1869, making it the second-oldest genealogical organization in the United States of America, preceded only by The New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS). The NYG&B is also the oldest genealogy organization in New York, and their quarterly publication, The Record, holds the title of longest-running publication in its field.
Despite their long history and focus on historical records, the NYG&B has transformed into a digitally savvy organization in the 21st century. Today, visitors can find countless resources on their website, such as a library of past webinars, self-paced courses through their New York Family History School, and a robust online records platform.
I had the opportunity to intern at the NYG&B in the summer of 2019 and was struck by the organization’s simultaneous dedication to historical records and technological innovation. Since my time at the NYG&B, I’ve been consistently impressed by their constantly evolving range of digital offerings. I recently sat down with Fred Wertz, Director of Digital Services at the NYG&B, to talk about digital strategy, his career in digital humanities, and the technological future of the organization.
Jesse Ludington: Can you tell me a little bit about what you focus on in your position as Director of Digital Services at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society?
Frederick Wertz: I really have three main areas I focus on in my role:
1. Digital marketing — This involves creating email marketing campaigns to inform our constituents about everything we’re doing–conferences, events, new online records, volunteer opportunities, and more. I have also established an extensive “content marketing” approach, which involves creating useful written web content that helps genealogical researchers solve their most pressing problems. Things like “A comprehensive guide to finding birth, marriage, and death certificates in New York” or “10 things you need to know about researching Irish immigrants”–these help us fulfill our mission to educate genealogical researchers, and they are also the way people discover our society and everything it offers–many people will find us for the first time when they read one of our guides, and then go on to become members, donors, or participate in our events.
2. Digital product development — this involves the actual construction and design of our website, and our online records platform, which is essentially a digital library for all of our material. I design what the site pages look like, how the features will work, and research what our members and users want from us and how they use the site. This is probably my favorite area of focus, because it involves such a wide range of things–interviewing and chatting with our members, some creative visual design, and also diving into the technical requirements and really thinking through how we can use technology to achieve our desired user experience.
3. Digitization of historical records — We now have a Digital Collections Manager who is the primary person who works on this, but I do oversee the end-to-end process. We just acquired a really powerful new scanner and processing software, so in late 2021 we had to completely overhaul our whole process–I created the new workflow for how a set of documents gets digitized and put on our website, from what we do when we first receive them, to image capture, QA, upload to the website, testing, etc.
A final comment on the above (sorry this answer was long, there’s a lot!)–really none of any of this existed when I started working here in 2016, so it’s been really fun and challenging to slowly build all of these different activities throughout the years. I feel very lucky that I’ve been able to contribute to the organization and the wider community in this way.
JL: How did you come to work on the digital side of cultural institutions? Can you tell me a little bit about your career trajectory?
FW: Sure–as I finished up my MA at Fordham University, I started a job at Fordham as an administrator in the Student Affairs division. I ran a work-study program in the University Transportation office (18-year-olds driving shuttle vans between campuses in NYC–fun but stressful!).
While doing that as a day job, I began moonlighting as a freelance writer. I was able to leverage my interest in and knowledge of history and pick up some really interesting work writing all sorts of things for a huge range of businesses, publications, and other organizations. That introduced me to the growing field of content marketing, and I eventually was able to land a full-time job as a content marketing writer for a UK-based genealogy company, Findmypast.
The current NYG&B President, Josh Taylor, was working for Findmypast at the time–he eventually left to assume his current role at the NYG&B, and several months after that I noticed an opening and applied.
I never really set out to work in digital humanities, but the right opportunities opened up for me at the right times. I never would have imagined I’d be able to keep working in areas related to my academic interests in my profession, so really a dream come true!
JL: Your graduate thesis, Redefining Suburban History: The Effect of Industry on 20th Century Suburbanization, particularly focuses on historical immigration in Westchester County. Have you always had an interest in the intersection of genealogy and digital media?
FW: I wouldn’t say so–I’ve always had a deep interest in history, and especially local history, but I didn’t really think much about digital media until I began working in the digital marketing space after graduating school.
I do think my academic experience definitely set the stage for my focus on history/genealogy and digital media though–I did so much work in tiny historical societies for my Master’s thesis and was just blown away at the quantity and quality of historical material and stories preserved by these tiny, volunteer-run institutions. For that reason I jumped at the opportunity to work for the NYG&B, because I saw the opening to help figure out how smaller non-profit organizations can leverage cutting edge tech to put their materials online and reach much wider audiences.
JL: Does the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society currently have a codified digital strategy?
FW: I would say yes–we have a well-defined digital marketing funnel, user/audience personas, a product roadmap (a list of desired features and improvements to add to the website in the future), and a very full pipeline of historical material to digitize and publish on our website.
But at an even higher level, we really just see the digital space as yet another way we can work to achieve the same mission we’ve had since 1869–using the most contemporary technology available to preserve historical material that is useful to those researching New York Family History. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, that focused on transcribing records and creating bound, typeface volumes/journals, and now that focus is on capturing images of original documents, creating searchable indexes, and publishing on the web.
JL: How do you measure the success of your digital engagement?
FW: Good question! The world of digital analytics can be complicated, but we keep things relatively simple–we like to see website users viewing images of our digitized records. The more images viewed each month, the more we know people are using what we’ve preserved.
I also pay particularly close attention to what I like to call “deep research sessions”–those are website visits where users spend more than 10 minutes on the site AND view more than ten different document images. Regardless of whether or not they’re finding what they’re looking for (impossible to tell from web analytics), longer, deeper, sessions show that they’re at least seriously engaging with the material we have preserved.
If we’re looking at something educational–like a written guide or a video webinar–we want to see users spending a significant amount of time on that piece of content, or measure how much of it they get through, e.g., someone scrolling 75% or more down the page an article is on or watching at least 75% of an entire webinar.
JL: Who is your target audience when it comes to NYG&B digital communications? Does it change depending on the medium and content?
FW: It actually doesn’t change too much–whether we’re sending an email, posting to Facebook, or creating YouTube videos, we’re talking to anyone who is researching individuals from New York State. Research interests (time periods, different groups of people, geographic areas, etc.) can differ widely between people, so we make sure we’re always creating a diverse array of content.
JL: While the NYG&B serves many people, the in-house team is quite small at about 8 people. What are some of the challenges and opportunities that come with working on a small team?
FW: It can definitely be hard when we have very ambitious goals but a very finite amount of human power. We all wear multiple hats, which sometimes prevents us from specializing in one specific area as much as we’d like to.
But it’s fun to do a wide range of things, and a small team allows us to be really agile and sometimes pivot very quickly to something new when an unexpected opportunity comes up.
JL: As a digital specialist in the nonprofit cultural sector, you have a unique perspective when it comes to the future of tech. What opportunities for technological innovation at the NYG&B do you see on the horizon?
FW: I’m just really excited at how accessible powerful technology has become. We’re able to leverage software and services that up until just a few years ago would have been way out of our league.
The online records platform we built for all of our digital material runs on a combination of Drupal (an open-source website content management system), Elastic Search (a really powerful cloud-based search/indexing service), and Amazon Web Services S3 (inexpensive, reliable, scalable hosting for our millions of digital images).
All of these are easy to fit within our budget, easy for us to implement and are really powerful and reliable. Finally, thanks to the prevalence of remote work, we’re able to hire talented developers and software engineers from all over the globe to help bring our visions to life.
I’m so glad that it’s not just enterprise, for-profit businesses that can leverage this technology in this day and age!
JL: The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on cultural institutions of all kinds. How has the NYG&B adapted its digital approach to the current situation?
FW: Our digitization efforts did take a huge hit–we were really limited in having people in our offices scanning and capturing images. But overall, as people went online more during the pandemic, we made sure to meet them there — we offered a ton of webinars, online conferences, and other virtual events.
We were lucky that we had already positioned ourselves to be very digital-focused, so when the pandemic hit it was just a matter of scaling up what we had already established.
JL: Lastly, how do you envision the future of digital engagement at the NYG&B?
FW: We really want to ramp up the amount of physical material we’re able to publish on the web for the first time ever. So, we hope to get in more volunteers to help us scan what we have now, and we’re always looking for more material we can obtain to publish online.
But probably most exciting–we’re beginning a major effort to partner with smaller historical and genealogical societies from around the state to help them digitize their own material. We hope to provide any needed equipment, expertise, or software to allow them to preserve their valuable collections and allow people around the world to benefit from them. It’s a personal goal of mine to share as many of the lessons we’ve learned about how to leverage technology as cheaply and efficiently as possible to achieve amazing things.
This interview has been edited for grammar and clarity.
