Gramps offers a field “Internet” for each person, as well as “Source Citations” not only for each person, but also for any events, gallery images, etc.
Indicating sources is of primary importance. But we are living in a world that becomes increasingly digitized (see all archive digitization projects), and it would be very helpful to also be able to have a URL field for each source.
Or is there an easy (standardised) way of achieving this? Thank you very much for all suggestions, and apologies if this has already been discussed and I missed finding it…
My personal “standard” is to attach a Note (of note type “Link”) to a citation, and to paste the URL into the note. I also attach the downloaded image in the citation’s Gallery. But these are both secondary, and just for convenience. The details of the original record are more important to have, in case the URL breaks in the future, or the online source ceases to exist altogether. So, for example, rather than recording which FamilySearch or Ancestry “database” or “collection” I found a record in, I record the details of the original book/document/manuscript that they scanned.
You might want to create your own standard workflow for this. There is talk of expanding to allow such data for objects. But since that entails a database & file format change, it isn’t likely until the 6.0 release.
But, if you create an “Internet” attribute for the object that simulates the internet value, when the feature IS implmented then you could write a SuperToll script to convert the attribute to the standardized data structure. In this case, it might use compounded data the Attribute name (e.g., an E-mail Internet data might be titled “Internet:E-mail”) and the value has the precise value that would be in the Internet tab.
TBH, “Internet Address” is a clumsy (and unprecise) way of saying “URL” (or actually rather “URI”). It would be nice if it were not (only) a field of its own, but an additional attribute of sources - as for the impermanence of these identifiers, I would not be too worried. FamilySearch or Ancestry are one case, but I was more thinking of digitized archives - e.g. France has digitised all of its civic holding of the archives departementales, and many archives and libraries are doing the same (not to speak of the immense Google Books project, the Internet Archive also benefits from).
I like to capture the “shared link” from the Ancestry record. I also upload my data to WikiTree.
I tried creating an attribute for the URL but found that attributes are not included in the gedcom standard.
So, after entering the needed data into the Vol/Page field I add a , and a couple of spaces, then append the URL.
This appears in the right place in the WikiTree citation.
Whatever solution you come up with, it has to be included in the gedcom export.
Notes don’t work for me because the data is not included in the actual citation in WikiTree.
Thanks for pointing that out. I chose the Notes approach for URLs because I like how it looks in the Endnotes section of reports. I haven’t done much with WikiTree yet but I had noticed that I didn’t like how it used my GEDCOM export.
