Thursday, May 31, 2007

Volunteer Indexing vs. Commercial Indexing

Ask a question, get an answer.

You know we've been trying to pull together a comparison between FamilySearch's volunteer approach to record indexing and Ancestry.com's subscription-based indexing model. Ancestry charges users a subscription fee, which it then uses to pay transcribers to index records.

A source within FamilySearch reveals that 2 million names are being indexed per week. At that rate, FamilySearch could index the complete US Census Collection in... 5+ years.

Come on, people. If we're going to make volunteer indexing work, you better pick up the pace. Sign up at www.familysearchindexing.org.

2 comments:

  1. I signed up to do some indexing, but then decided it was kind of ridiculous to index for Family Search when Ancestry and HeritageQuest have already indexed those same records. How many versions do we need?

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  2. That's a good point. May we quote you in future postings about commercial indexing vs. volunteer indexing?

    On the FamilySearch Indexing Project page there is a list of projects that we understand you can sign up for. If you're not interested in any from FamilySearch, you can sign up for one of the outside projects by contacting the individuals listed.

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