This is day two in my week long experiment to review seven web sites in hopes of developing a matrix to further evaluate web sites.  If you missed my first post, it was about Project Gutenburg.  Today’s web site for review is under the direction of the Bureau of Land Management and is the repository for the General Land Office Records for many states.  The link is below:

http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/

Summary:  Once in awhile you find a site that you just type in random names to see what pulls up.  This is exactly the kind of web site you can spend hours plugging in your great grandparents names and get information about where they lived and in some cases how much they paid for their land.  My first impression is that this is a very clean site, though I’m not sure how the row of landscape pictures across the top serves a purpose for the overall User Interface design and therefore recommend it’s removal and the site would look a step up in the realm of presentation.  After using the site for a over 100 searches of my ancestral home lands, I was impressed by the performance of the site and its ease of use, which is obviously a goal the developers placed high on the requirements list.

For example my Great Grandfather Charley F Reynolds lived in Arkansas I found in less than a minute and I even spelled his first name incorrectly.  The document that was provided listed the legal land description.  Some one with a little more skill than I have acquired to date, might be able to determine the exact location where Charley lived, unfortunately I’ll just use the City, State and County information to do more genealogical research.  One final recommendation for change… in addition to legal land descriptions, integrate with either Bing Maps or Google Maps and show your users exactly where the land is located.

Pros:

• Direct and to the point this site will allow quick searches in addition to providing scans of original documents to the user in multiple file formats
• Performance of this web site is snappy and image optimization is high
• This is a government web site so accessibility is a concern and this site adheres to Section 508 compliance.
• Loved the small add in the bottom right advertising the wild horse and burro program

Cons:

• Ok, does every government web site have to look the same?
• Legal land description is hard to pinpoint on a map
• Well, maybe only hard core genealogists really care about this site