Friday, January 13, 2012

FamilySearch Historical Collections Update - A Quandary

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I have a quandary... [SOLVED - see Update at bottom of post]

When I checked the FamilySearch Historical Record Collections page, it looks like it's stuck on 1,000 databases.

I check this almost every day, and when I looked at it on 1 January 2012 for my yearly Benchmark Numbers update, it said 1,000 collections.

Today, it still says 1,000 collections:


The screen above is for the "Last Updated" link that I use to see what's been recently added or updated.  There have been 33 databases added or updated on this list since 31 December.

Is the number of collections shown wrong?  Or have no NEW databases been added since 31 December?  Or is something wrong with my computer, or browser?

One more thing - when I click on the "Last Updated" link, I expect to see a clear list from a recent date to the first date on the list (1,000 lines down the list).  I don't see that, and you can see it in the above screen shot.

A ways down the list is this segment:


After several databases added on 12 January 2012, there are ten databases listed with update dates earlier than 11 January, followed by the databases for 11 January 2012.

Is the list messed up somehow?  Are the dates listed when the database was first added, and the database has been updated, but the updated date was not corrected?

I rely on this list to tell me what new databases have been added to the FamilySearch collection so that I can check out the newly added databases and can blog about them.  I wish that it would highlight the absolutely NEW collections somehow.  I hope that FamilySearch will fix these, admittedly minor, problems.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/01/familysearch-historical-collections-update.html

Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2012.

UPDATED 3 p.m.:  Quandary solved ...

Robert Kehrer, Sr. Product Manager for Search Technologies at FamilySearch emailed me with this information:

"We hit an artificial code limit somewhere down in the system. There are more than 1000 collections. Only 1000 of them are displayed however. You would have to use the filters to get to the ones cut off the bottom of the list.  It will be fixed in our next release."

That's good news, and I appreciate Robert's rapid response and permitting this to be shared with my readers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Randy - click on "Last Updated" a 2nd time, and it will list the dates from newest to oldest ... at least it did for me.

I agree that it should do it the first time you click, but I can live with it, if that's all it takes to fix this issue.

Randy Seaver said...

Jenny,

I clicked on the darn thing a bunch of times and nothing changed. Hit Refresh and nothing changed. Still says 1000, still has the dates out of order.Happened for me using IE9 and Chrome.

do you see the same list that is in my post? Can you show me a screen shot?
rjseaver@cox.net