ROOTS & BRANCHES

Just a couple of months ago, your “Roots & Branches” columnist trumpeted a reinvention of the Salt Lake City-based Family History Library into a repository of true global reach.

The impetus for that column was a virtual get-together at which the top folks from the library revealed their plans, including starting a book look-up service, offering consultations with its staff of experts, and changing the library’s web URL from one that was difficult to find to an intuitive one— https://www.familysearch.org/family-history-library.

Apparently that virtual meeting went well enough that FamilySearch, the umbrella brand for all of the genealogy efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had another one earlier this month. The church, commonly known as the Mormons, has a theological interest in collecting records so members can offer posthumous baptism to ancestors and relatives.

The focuses of this event were to give a group of the genealogy community’s notables a look under the hood at FamilySearch’s process to bring records to people in digital form and make them accessible through indexing. The presentations were simply excellent and show some interesting innovations coming down the pike.

Ty Davies, portfolio director of FamilySearch Imaging, ran those listening through a historical timeline of records collecting and sharing that started with FamilySearch’s predecessor, the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1896.

Gathering, copying and bringing records to Salt Lake was replaced by microfilming records across the globe beginning in the 1930s. Computer-assisted research went through a number of steps culminating with the creation of FamilySearch.org in 1999, and digitization of the microfilms began in earnest in 2010.

Just a decade later, some 4.5 billion images are online at FamilySearch, with more than a million images added daily.

What FamilySearch has encountered has been a true “embarrassment of riches,” with the processing time from when an image is first created to going online reaching an average of more than eight months, with 36 employees having some role in the process.

Davies said there are “very large initiatives are underway to bring digital content online faster”—including a business goal of collapsing the “entire pipeline from snapping the digital image to online publication within 24 hours.”

The key is that it’s “cheaper to generate and gather content than to process and catalog it,” Davies noted.

Many archival institutions have this processing gap and some give users access to unprocessed content anyway, leading a so-called “dark archives” in which the content is technically available but not easily usable. FamilySearch wants to avoid this.

Among the solutions FamilySearch is working on are: augmenting professional staff with trained volunteers who have local language expertise; focusing on standardization; and working to allow users to make changes in real time.

FamilySearch, Davies said, is targeting access in a variety of ways—online, in the Family History Library and Family History Centers, and through partner libraries.

This is all well and good, you might say, but what you’d really like is for these digital products to be searchable by name. Well, FamilySearch “has an app for that,” so to say, but that will be next week’s “Roots & Branches” column.