New Icon for partially indexed records
Researchers often click on the magnifying glass icon, that indicates a film is indexed, to find their ancestors. If the name does not show up, they move on to other records. However, many of these films are not fully indexed, and their ancestors could indeed be found on the film if the researcher browsed the film. My suggestion is that a new icon should be created for a PARTIALLY INDEXED RECORDS, to indicate to users that they should check for an indexed record first, then browse the film if necessary. Sheila Winkelspecht
Comments
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I have been of this view for many years. As you say, many users would give up on looking for their relatives' events (say baptism, marriage or burial) by getting the impression all the pages had been indexed. In some cases, I expect "FamilySearch" has no idea certain pages (perhaps just a few) have inadvertently (or otherwise) not been indexed. I found an the marriage of a pair of ancestors after a visit to a record office (in Norfolk, England), then discovered it did appear in an "indexed" collection - only just that very page had been omitted from the process!
I believe I can relate to your main point, however. As one scrolls through the images in a digitised film, the indexed pages show as unavailable for attachment, but other pages (that have not been indexed) do have the option of being directly attached to IDs.
I don't know how easy it is for FamilySearch to detect that certain pages / sections of a film have not been indexed, but your idea would be a great help in encouraging researchers not to give up too easily in their attempts to find that "elusive" event!
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The determination of "fully indexed" versus "partially indexed" is (greatly) complicated by the presence of organizational images (bookmarks/section markers, header or title pages) on every film. These contain no indexable data, and therefore have no index entries associated with them. Therefore, any automated process would determine that every single film on FS is at best partially indexed.
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