FamilySearch Indexing

Fam­il­y­Search, the geneal­o­gy records arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, is busy scan­ning and index­ing the bulk of their 2.6 mil­lion reels of micro­film.

The index­ing process is a col­lab­o­ra­tive “crowd sourc­ing” web project, involv­ing the genealog­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty. In fact, since May, the Fam­il­y­Search web­site has released dig­i­tized and crowd-source indexed genealog­i­cal records con­tain­ing 500 mil­lion names on their beta web­site: http://beta.familysearch.org/.

Index­ing is done through a dou­ble-blind process, where two index­ers inde­pen­dent­ly fill out forms with the index infor­ma­tion. The indexed val­ues are com­pared, and when they match com­plete­ly, they are accept­ed. When there is a dis­crep­an­cy between two index entries, they are sent for arbi­tra­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, if users pass over records with­out index­ing the, Fam­il­y­Search looks at the images to deter­mine if they might need to be scanned again.

If you are inter­est­ed in paric­i­pat­ing, see http://indexing.fsbeta.familysearch.org/

For more infor­ma­tion, read the FAQ: http://indexing.familysearch.org/support/faq.jsf