Friday, June 13, 2008

Ancestry Indexing Project Beta

Illustration from Ancestry World Archives Project e-mail

People who signed up on the the Ancestry World Archives Project's introductory page received an e-mail last night with further information about the Ancestry World Archives Project:

You signed up to receive news and updates about the upcoming World Archives Project. We’re excited to announce that we’re officially kicking off the project. We invite you to watch this brief video that captures the true meaning behind this exciting new undertaking.

Ancestry will create digital images of archive records as the first step in the project. Volunteers who transcribe the records using Ancestry's indexing tool. Ancestry will then create an index and publish it free to everyone.

We began alpha testing the World Archives Project in May and we’ve planned beta testing for July. When beta testing begins, you’ll be one of the first people invited to try the new World Archives Project tool. Look out for an email from us in July.

Visitors may still sign up for notifications about the project at http://landing.ancestry.com/keyingtool/notify.aspx , where the possibility of helping with the beta test is also mentioned.

Project History

  • 5-March-2008 - Word of the Ancestry World Archives Project first became public via a post on the Ancestry sponsored 24-7 Family History Circle blog.
  • 18-March-2008 - Ancestry president, Tim Sullivan, mentions the project during his BYU genealogy conference keynote, as reported here.
  • 21-April-2008 - Internally announced to employees (see this post). All Generations Network Utah employees began testing the keying tool.
  • 29-April-2008 - T-shirts with the project name are spotted in Provo; reported here.
  • May-2008 - Began alpha testing, according to the 12-June e-mail.
  • 12-June-2008 - Ancestry sent out an e-mail announcing the upcoming beta test.
  • July-2008 - Planned start of beta testing, according to the e-mail.

2 comments:

  1. Insider,

    Not that I am interested in participating, but is there a list of upcoming Ancestry indexing projects similar to the one for Family Search indexing?

    Mike

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am not indexing for Ancestry AT ALL and would encourage other genealogists to do the same. Ancestry is a for-profit business and if you notice in the article at Genealogy Insider, you will see that they WILL NOT provide the images for free when all is said and done. Index for FamilySearch, it's much better than shoving money down the throats of Ancestry's corporate higher-ups. I've indexed over 20,000 names for FamilySearch and not stopping anytime soon...

    -Henry W.

    ReplyDelete

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