Two future features I would love to see
Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 9:09 pm
Two future features I would love to see: user-selected microfilm indexing, and a unique global name identifier for all historical individuals (using a lesson from Google)
At some point in the near future, when the Church’s huge collection of microfilm images are digitized and online in large numbers, I hope there will develop a general realization and consensus that two more major features would greatly enhance that system. One new feature would be a mechanism for users to be able to chose by time and location which microfilm images they wish to transcribe and index for their (and the public’s) benefit. Obviously, users will tend to choose microfilm that is related to their ancestors, and they will have a personal interest in doing the best possible job of transcribing it. They will have a big incentive to do the indexing on pages of data from several record collections so they can reference those document images in their family collections of data. They will be able to direct any interested person to those same images which will be conveniently online, compliments of the Church. This will mean that every genealogist can have many of the benefits of a family website without the need to actually establish their own separate website. There will be no need to copy those voluminous images to their personal site. Allowing users to select the microfilm data they wish to enter and index should greatly supplement the current, more generalized indexing system where images to be indexed are chosen and assigned by the system itself. (From a user’s perspective, the microfilm selections made automatically by the current system may appear to be completely random, instead of being tied directly to the research work the users want to do anyway).
The other feature, the need for which I hope will slowly creep into the consciousness of a large number of genealogists, would be to gradually establish a single identifying number for each person and name in the history of the world. This concept has been suggested many times before by others, but until now there has been no simple and practical way to carry it out, as far as I can tell. Having a unique global identifier for each historical person would allow the efficient cooperation of thousands of descendents in assembling and correlating in one place all known data about that historical individual. Data about one historical person could be on a single central site or on multiple websites and yet all of it could be linked easily and accurately to that individual through this common ID number. Without getting into the details of execution, I suggest that the final identifying number for an historical person be competitively determined (rather than be assigned by any particular group of people). Google uses a similar concept to automatically rank the importance of millions of websites, helping to determine which will appear highest on a search results page. An historical person might initially have several or even hundreds of numbers established as their potential long term ID number, as many genealogists store the overlapping results of their work in a central database. In most cases the number that would be chosen as the key, around which to collect all future data, could be selected relatively quickly and easily by the simple expedient of choosing the number that already has the greatest amount of high quality data associated with it, giving special weight to names with the largest number of links to that person’s relatives. There would naturally occur a positive reinforcement process whereby the best initial version would also be the one most added to, making it grow quickly into the clear winner. The remaining numbers for that historical person would not be deleted, but would just be ignored thereafter.
At some point in the near future, when the Church’s huge collection of microfilm images are digitized and online in large numbers, I hope there will develop a general realization and consensus that two more major features would greatly enhance that system. One new feature would be a mechanism for users to be able to chose by time and location which microfilm images they wish to transcribe and index for their (and the public’s) benefit. Obviously, users will tend to choose microfilm that is related to their ancestors, and they will have a personal interest in doing the best possible job of transcribing it. They will have a big incentive to do the indexing on pages of data from several record collections so they can reference those document images in their family collections of data. They will be able to direct any interested person to those same images which will be conveniently online, compliments of the Church. This will mean that every genealogist can have many of the benefits of a family website without the need to actually establish their own separate website. There will be no need to copy those voluminous images to their personal site. Allowing users to select the microfilm data they wish to enter and index should greatly supplement the current, more generalized indexing system where images to be indexed are chosen and assigned by the system itself. (From a user’s perspective, the microfilm selections made automatically by the current system may appear to be completely random, instead of being tied directly to the research work the users want to do anyway).
The other feature, the need for which I hope will slowly creep into the consciousness of a large number of genealogists, would be to gradually establish a single identifying number for each person and name in the history of the world. This concept has been suggested many times before by others, but until now there has been no simple and practical way to carry it out, as far as I can tell. Having a unique global identifier for each historical person would allow the efficient cooperation of thousands of descendents in assembling and correlating in one place all known data about that historical individual. Data about one historical person could be on a single central site or on multiple websites and yet all of it could be linked easily and accurately to that individual through this common ID number. Without getting into the details of execution, I suggest that the final identifying number for an historical person be competitively determined (rather than be assigned by any particular group of people). Google uses a similar concept to automatically rank the importance of millions of websites, helping to determine which will appear highest on a search results page. An historical person might initially have several or even hundreds of numbers established as their potential long term ID number, as many genealogists store the overlapping results of their work in a central database. In most cases the number that would be chosen as the key, around which to collect all future data, could be selected relatively quickly and easily by the simple expedient of choosing the number that already has the greatest amount of high quality data associated with it, giving special weight to names with the largest number of links to that person’s relatives. There would naturally occur a positive reinforcement process whereby the best initial version would also be the one most added to, making it grow quickly into the clear winner. The remaining numbers for that historical person would not be deleted, but would just be ignored thereafter.