Thursday, January 15, 2009

Checking out the Family History Library - Post 1

I know that some of my readers have never been to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, so I thought that I would show some photographs of the place (unfortunately, not all of my shots came out well).

The Library entrance looks like this:




There are five floors:

B2 - British Isles (including Australia/NZ) records (films and books)
B1 - International Records (films and books)
1 - Main floor, Family History Books
2 - US/Canada Census books and Microfilms
3 - US/Canada Locality Books and Maps

Each floor has an area with computers to access the FHL Catalog, the FHL databases, and the online commercial databases. Each floor with books has a photocopy area, a set of microfilm printers and two microfilm scanner/printers.

Photocopies are paid for with a Print Card, which cost 60 cents and can be loaded with bills up to $20. A hard copy on a copy machine costs only 5 cents, but a copy on the microfilm printer costs 23 cents. The computers and the microfilm scanners can put images on a user's flash drive for free.

This is a view of the Family History Book stacks on the first floor:



This is a view of the computer area on the third floor:


In the computer area, you send your print requests to print stations (visible above) where you pay for your prints then get them printed out.
Here is a shot of one row of the microfilm drawers - there are about 8 rows of film drawers like this on the second floor.



I will show some of the copy hardware in a later post.

3 comments:

Becky Thompson said...

Thank you for posting this, Randy! I found it quite interesting. I've been there but not to do research yet. It's nice to know how they arrange the printing etc. Every little bit of knowledge helps!

Melissa Barker said...

Thanks Randy for sharing this. I have not yet made the trek to Salt Lake, maybe one day.

The photo's look like Genealogy Heaven!!!

Melissa Barker

Jennifer said...

Wow. That row of microfilm drawers reminds me of the last scene of Indiana Jones...