Indexing -- give indexers options
In my stake we have lost MOST of our indexers -- why--there is no variety of projects to do any more. Most of the projects are church registers, There are no more options to use tables when indexing-- this saves the indexers valuable time. Take this project- Ireland, Tyrone—Church Records, 1740–1880 [Part B][MQZ4-CC1]. It's on a sheet of two pages with 33 records.
Indexers must use form entry instead of table entry. This takes away our ability to save time and index more.
We need to be mindful of the people indexing and not waste their time. Our stake just had a training and the lack of projects for beginners left the people being trained saying-- it's too complicated. I do wonder if indexing is going away. There are lots of places in the community to volunteer and people are moving to options where they are appreciated and feel like their time is being put to good use. Thank you
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The thing is, when it's easy, then even the computer can do it -- and even if they give it to people to do, it goes much faster than the difficult stuff. Hence the shortage of beginner-level projects, and the shortage of batches within whatever beginner-level projects there are.
It's a tradeoff: the computer is much faster than the beginner indexers, so it'll result in more indexed records, which makes research easier for everyone -- but it comes at the cost of fewer people trained in indexing.
Maybe what we need is "training batches", revived from already-completed projects. These would need to be clearly marked as "training only", so that people would know that their work on it will not be actually published. (Perhaps as a consolation prize, they could be compared to the published index, to give the beginner some feedback.)
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Training batches...with comparison to the actual index...that is an excellent idea!
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