Thursday, June 21, 2007

LDS Record Search Pilot Capability

I read the news on Family Search Labs on Tuesday about the Record Search Pilot capability (images without an index) and thought "that's nice." Then I read Chris Dunham's post today about this, and thought that Chris nailed it with his comment that:

"...Genealogists raised on microfilm are used to scanning page after page for a single relevant record; there's no reason to hold back digitized records until every name is cataloged. Providing the images online with simple finding aids should suffice for researchers eager to ferret out family facts."

Exactly right! So I went back to the FamilySearch Labs post and tried to figure out how to sign up. I finally found a link for "Record Search" on the blog home page here, which leads to this page where you can view a video on "Getting Started."

I had to register (email, name, location) in order to use the "Record Search" capability. But I have to wait to be approved. I'll add on to this post when that happens!

For the time being, I would be happy as a clam to be able to view digitized pages from FHL microfilms and microfiches. I don't mind going page-by-page through records - I've been doing that a long time. It's fun...unless you can't find what you want!

In the meantime, if you want to be able to do this, click the links above and register for access to the Record Search Pilot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Randy,

Just visited your blog for the second time today :) and was happy to see this information you relay. As you said Chris did nail it with his comment, and most serious researchers would be glad of the opportunity to do manual searching, instead of waiting for an index to be completed.

I will be interested to see what your report will be, assuming you get approved (I wonder if they will only approve those who have volunteered for their indexing projects).

Mike Ferguson