OHAUGLAI-L Archives

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Subject: BYU Library Collections - Digitized Information -
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 20:49:29 EST

Hello to all of you! I saw the following information come across a different
mailing list & thought it could be of interest to one &
all. So, I've copied/pasted it here for you:

You can go to the Brigham Young University website <A HREF="http://www.lib.byu.edu/">http://www.lib.byu.edu/</A>;
and do searches of over
5000 books which the Family History Library has put online.* ... the LDS
Family History Library has
announced that it has begun the process of digitizing and making available on
the Internet all of the
Family History books in their collection. These are primarily books in the
"929.273Series" that are
currently housed on the first floor of the Family History Library (previously
housed on the fourth floor
of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building). At the present time (Sept 2005),
about 5000 books have been
digitized and are available. They've announced that they are adding abt 100
titles/week to the on-line collection.
Copyright issues are playing a role in determining the order in which they
progress
through this task; books out of copyright are being done first.As these
Family
History books are digitized and placed on-line, an entry is being placed in
the
Family History Library on-line catalog with a hyperlink to the digitized
image.
By going to the FHL On-Line Catalog, you can search for a specific name, find
a book that has been indexed using the name, and view it on-line, flipping
through the pages as separate "pdf" images, much the same as if you were on
the
first floor of the Family History Library. =Of course, the indexing that is
available through the FHL Catalog is only as good as the human indexers made
it;
typically they only include the "top" 4 to 6 names that appear in each book
in
their indexing efforts. But there is even better news!The digitized images of
these Family History books are actually being stored on the electronic
servers at BYU in Provo, Utah.
By going directly to the BYU web site to view the images, there are several
additional possibilities that
provide genealogists functionality that they have never had before. You are
now
able to do full-text searches on each book, and on every digitized book in
the
collection. Now you can locate the small two-paragraph entry on Grandpa
Ebenezer McGarrah that is buried in one of the Family History books that you
would
have otherwise never thought to look at before. This can open up a huge new
possibility for extending lines,getting past brick walls, and uncovering new
relatives!=How to Find The Digitized Images?Go to the web site of the Harold
B. Lee
Library at BYU at <A HREF="http://www.lib.byu.edu/">http://www.lib.byu.edu/</A>; on their home page, follow the
links "Find Other Materials/Electronic/On Line Collections at BYU". Click on
the
"Text Collections" tab and select the "Family History Archive" from the list
of
collections that are displayed.You would then normally want to use the
"Search All" feature with the "Search Full
Text" box checked, although the "Advanced Search" will allow very
high-powered searches that will allow certain
phrases to be searched for and other words to be used to exclude potential
hits. As
you make selections from the "hits" that are displayed, you will need to use
the "Click Here to View Item" button near the top of the screen to display
the
actual image of the page. You can page through the entire document using the
index displayed on the left side of the screen. Each page may be printed
after
being viewed.One interesting sidelight is, when you are at the first web page
for the Family History Archive (the page that lets you begin a search), click
on the "Browse the Collection" button. This will display every Family History
book that has been digitized and is available in the collection.You can
scroll
through this list much the same as if you were walking up and down the stacks
at the library. At the top of the first page of the search results, it
displays the number of hits, which (in this case) is the number of books in
the
collection. If you keep track of this number, you can get a pretty good idea
of how
fast they are adding titles to the collection as you revisit the web site
from time to time. I think you will want to visit this site often as the
collection grows!"

I hope this information will be useful to you! I used to go through the BYU
collections and I found some
good information on several of my lines - years back. Being able to see it
this way can only be more useful,
I believe!

Pavla Chandler, Texas

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