The first of several planned video tutorials include:

• An Introduction to Fold3
• How to Search on Fold3
• Browse for Records on Fold3

Each video is 4-5 minutes long and designed to provide tips and strategies to help you make the most of your Fold3 membership.

Report to the Fold3 Training Center to find helpful video tutorials and links to one-page explanations of the most common how-to topics. Keep checking back as we add more video tutorials and help topics.

We’ve received some great feedback from those of you who use the site and have tried to address the issues you’ve raised.

In the newer viewer, images should load faster, be easier to use and be more connected to the images around them.

Here are some of the specific things that should make image viewing better:

1. Improved “About image” panel contains image details, contributions others have made and an easy way to add your own insights.
2. Combined breadcrumb and browse make getting to other images faster and easier and we’ve added infinite browse columns to make browsing faster.
3. Floating toolbar includes all the old favorites plus fit and fill buttons and a new magnifier tool.
4. Annotation and spotlight displays will only show when your cursor is over them, so they don’t clutter up the image.
5. “Find in image” now searches everything in the “About” panel and any text that was indexed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
6. New “Share” options include popular sharing sites and links for embedding images on your own blog or website.
7. Updated filmstrip will show your zoom area, what’s been added to an image, whether or not it’s in your gallery and will even let you move around the image.
8. New next and previous buttons let you get to nearby images without using the filmstrip.

We aren’t quite ready to release these changes into the wild, but there is an early version of the viewer that we’ve been testing with our library users.  You won’t see all the improvements and some things have changed from this version, but you can take the library version for a test drive here.

We’ll post more details and tips for using the new viewer once it’s ready to go.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions regarding the image viewing experience on Footnote, please let us know.

This free 30-minute introduction to using Footnote covers:

• Records you’ll find on Footnote
• Searching Footnote
• Using the Footnote viewer
• Creating Footnote Pages

We do our best to make Footnote easy to use (and we’d appreciate any feedback that can help us get there), but there’s so much you can do on the site that a tutorial like this is a great way to get going.

Have a look at the webinar and the Getting the most out of Footnote page and let us know what you think in a comment here or through the Contact Footnote page.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of I Remember.

Using Your Existing Footnote Account
You need a free Footnote registration to contribute to I Remember.  If you don’t have one, we create one for you, but if you do, be sure to click the “Already have a Footnote account?” link during the process of adding the application.

This will link your current account to I Remember and make it easier to work between the two sites.  If you run into any problems during this process, contact us at support@footnote.com and we’ll be glad to help.

Finding a Page
Since I Remember is focused on people, the search starts with a First and Last Name.  On the results page you can use the options in the left column to refine your search using a place or year.  Once you are on an I Remember page, you can go to the “Info” tab and see all the facts available to make sure you’ve found the right person.

Remembering and Sharing a Page
When you find the right page, clicking the “I Remember” button to the right of their name gives you a place to explain how you knew the person and then lets you save and share their page with your friends on Facebook or by email.  The first time you remember someone or add something to a page, you’ll be asked to add the I Remember application which adds a couple of steps to the process, but after that it should be smooth sailing.

Adding a Box to Your Profile
Facebook allows you to add a box to your profile that lists some of the people you remember.  This is a great way to quickly get to a page you are working on and lets your friends see who you remember.  Adding a box to your Facebook profile can be a bit tricky.  Here’s what you do:

1. Put your cursor over the “Settings” link at the top of any Facebook page
2. Click on “Applications Settings” from the pull down menu
   
3. Find “I Remember” in the list of applications
4. Click “Edit Settings”
5. On “Profile” tab in the “Edit I Remember Settings” box you’ll see a section called “Box.”  Clicking the “add” link next to “Available” will add the box to the “Boxes” tab on your profile.

To add the box to the main page of your profile, you’ll need to:

1. Go to your profile
2. Click on the Boxes tab
3. Click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner of the I Remember box
4. Click “Move to Wall Tab.”

We hope you’ll let us know what you think of the I Remember application and what we can do to make it better.

View the video below:

Try a wildcard search now.