Video Interview of Paul Nauta of FamilySearch

Paul Nauta is the Manager of Public Affairs at FamilySearch. He is actively involved with all the new services being released by FamilySearch and he has been a big help to me in keeping me updated in the past few years about everything that is new. If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know that there is a LOT that is new at FamilySearch all the time.

I had a chance to catch Paul in person at the recent FGS conference in Philadelphia.

Paul kindly sat down with me and explained some of the most recent projects of FamilySearch, the world's largest archive of genealogical records. Paul talked about the huge library in Salt Lake City, the 4,500 local Family History Centers around the world, the www.FamilySearch.org website, and the 8- to 10-year effort to convert all the microfilms to digital images. FamilySearch presently adds 40 million images per year. Paul also described the FamilySearch Indexing project.

The RootsTelevision camera crew caught our conversation on videotape and you can watch and listen to our conversation at http://rootstelevision.com/players/player_conferences.php?bctid=1794986844.

Comments

[Radix]

Does anybody know further details about the "Digital Microfilm Reader" that Paul mentions at around 8:00? He says that "You can go and test that" - does he mean that Dick can go and test it, or anybody can? It would certainly be interesting!

[Paul]

Radix:

Your email/question was forwarded to me by a member of the FamilySearch staff. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear in the interview with Dick. If you go to http://pilot.familysearch.org and do a search or press View the Entire Collection" of databases, you will quickly notice that some of the collection is not indexed, but are images only. In essence, these are microfilms that have been converted to digital images.

If you click on one of them, it will open the "film" or images in FamilySearch's new digital image viewer (digital film reader). I think you will find the viewer very intuitive and helpful in navigating the digital images.

Give it a try and let us know what you think by using the Feedback feature. Thanks for your interest and inquiry.

[Radix]

Hello Paul, and thank you for the speedy reply.

I didn't realize that the "digital film reader" was already in service on the http://pilot.familysearch.org site. Will take a look around there.

[Sandi]

Is anyone else having a problem viewing the videos on Roots Television? They never finish loading.

[theKiwi]

I watched 3 of them this morning and they all displayed and played without problems for me.

Roger