The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) has more than 2 million rolls of microfilmed birth, death and census records stored in granite vaults in the Wasatch Mountains, 25 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. According to the Associated Press, the church has now announced plans to digitize and index that information and make in available on the Internet.
"The goal is to create (Internet-accessible) indexes to all the films we have in the vault. That's a long-term process and that's a lot of films," said Paul Nauta, manager of public affairs for the church's FamilySearch Web site. The date when the indexes will be available has not been announced.
You can read more at http://tinyurl.com/8dtz2
This is fantastic news! I truly appreciate all the work the LDS has done to gather and make available genealogical documents from around the world, and having the indexes online will save a lot of time.
Posted by: Louise | September 14, 2005 at 09:22 AM
This is fantastic!
Posted by: joeT` | September 14, 2005 at 09:46 AM
From the referenced article and another I read, it sounds like they are going to be doing something like Automated Genealogy (www.automatedgenealogy.com) has done for the 1901 Canadian Census -- that is, providing a web-based transcription site. There, volunteers from anywhere in the world can transcribe a page image scanned from microfilm into an web form. The transcription is immediately added to the searchable index.
It's great idea that allows an unlimited number of contributors to cooperate on a huge project.
Posted by: Mark | September 14, 2005 at 01:06 PM
And, I've heard rumblings that there will be some integration with the next version of PAF.
Posted by: Dino (All Dino, All the Time) | September 14, 2005 at 03:48 PM