An entry posted this past Thursday by John Reid on his blog, Anglo-Celtic Connections, pointed out a change developing at FamilySearch.org. Volunteering to index microfilmed records is now a thing of the past. AI will do all the heavy lifting of transcribing documents; volunteers will now provide the follow-up double-check.
It's been quite some time since I last volunteered to do indexing at FamilySearch—likely when the 1950 U.S. Census was made public and the race was on to make it searchable. Then, the recently-debuted Artificial Intelligence driven handwriting recognition machines took over the hard work, and volunteers did the spot-checking of possible mistaken entries. Most of the tasks for the human volunteers seemed quite streamlined; the speed with which the records went live to the public attested to that game-changing approach.
Reading John Reid's post last Thursday prompted me to revisit the indexing page on the FamilySearch website to glean more details. Apparently, back in March, the FamilySearch blog began a series of articles highlighting what was coming next for this new way of volunteering. I had already seen that the old tab used to select indexing opportunities had received its new label, "Get Involved," but reading up on the change spelled out the greater role AI was playing in bringing so many digitized records online faster than ever before. Indexing is evolving. And I'm grateful, both as a researcher and as a volunteer, to experience the benefits of these changes.
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