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Thursday, October 21, 2010

FamilySearch Bloggers Day in Salt Lake continued -- Part Six

More observations and notes directly from the Bloggers Day at FamilySearch sitting in the briefing room.  (The views and observations in this post and others are my own, they are not necessarily those of the presenters or FamilySearch). This is the sixth set of observations.

Some of these notes may be rather obscure, I would suggest that you send me a comment with any questions. I will also try to clarify issues in future posts, if there is interest.

More on New FamilySearch. One of the many issues in making changes to the huge database already online is the issue of sources. For example, the issue is standardization in source citations. Do all of the source citations have to conform to a certain format? What about the preservation of links to external sources, what happens if the original citation source online is no longer there (the link is broken)? There are huge questions to be answered before certain.

FamilySearch Records Access: Collections coming on Record Search. Providing more records, to more people, faster. The goal is to add the images, then provide first light indexes then later heavy indexing. In the end the hope is to provide family linking.  A good example is that 100% of the Argentine records, 5 million images, will be online before the end of the year. However, they are proceeding with the indexing. Selecting Locality Priority is a huge part of the ongoing challenge facing FamilySearch. There was an extensive discussion of the affiliate partnership issues with making documents available online.  70 million records including 28 million images published in the last ninety days. Every single week new content is going online.

The amount of information being provided is staggering. It will likely take me some considerable time to digest.

FamilySearch.org: Where is it going? The main emphasis seems to be that FamilySearch will foster collaboration and connections between users. Of course, the direction is mostly indicated by the Beta.FamilySearch.org website, but that site is still under development. There was a review of all of the records that are currently available and how they are being migrated to the Beta FamilySearch website. The Beta site had 35 thousand visitors yesterday as an example of the huge interest in these websites.

There are presently 105 Research Courses videos online on the Beta FamilySearch.org website.

As you can see, there was a lot of information in a concentrated format.

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