WUD -- The future of Searching

WUD is a customized search engine and online curation tool for historical and cultural data. WUD stands for "what's up doc?" Quoting from the project page sponsored as a project of the Medicine and Society chair at the University of Fribourg, directed byAlexandre Wenger and Radu Suciu with IT research and development by Adriano Perlini:

WUD is a customised search engine helping you to pull, link and organise data from two major cultural heritage repositories: Europeana.eu and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). It was developed as part of the research and outreach activities of the Medicine and Society chair at University of Fribourg. 

This project was initially intended for researchers : like most Digital Humanities projects, it stems out from a previous endeavour – the Medicine and food virtual exhibition for which we had to hand-pick images and documents from around the Web. We figured we could fire up existing online tools and APIs in order to streamline and speed up this curation process. WUD does exactly that: saves us hours of clicking and downloading and assembling.

Very few genealogists are familiar with either the Digital Public Library of America or the vast resources of the Europeana.eu website. However, there is one class listed at the upcoming RootsTech 2016 Conference on the Digital Public Library of America but nothing yet on Europeana.eu. There is certainly nothing at the upcoming conference on the selection of Apps available for use with these two online databases. The WUD program or app is just one of a number of very useful utilities available from the Digital Public Library of America's App Library.



There is a whole world of information, some extremely valuable to genealogical inquiries, that is usually not mentioned in connection with the usual record repository lists. Some of these websites, such as Europeana.eu are so vast that it is difficult to determine any kind of numbers associated with their online connections. They are certainly worth exploring.