1.2 million volunteers worldwide contribute to the FamilySearch indexing program, which brings billions of historical records to life. NewsOK out of Oklahoma brought this information to our attention in their article, “Indexing projects make family records more accessible.”

FamilySearch is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its web-based, volunteer-driven indexing initiative. Every week, FamilySearch publishes millions of digital images of historic records from around the world.

One of the most recent undertakings of FamilySearch is the indexing of the names and records of nearly 1.8 million African-American men, women and children through The Freedmen’s Bureau project by 25,000 volunteers in one under one year.

With any indexing project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.