"Addition Date" Column for Historical Record Search Results

RHGC

I'm not sure if this suggestion has already been made. However, based on my experience of almost daily checking the new records indexed on FamilySearch, I believe adding a new column to the search results would be incredibly useful.

Currently, the search results for indexed records include three columns: Name, Events, and Relationships.:

I suggest including the date each indexed record was added. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have a way to sort the records to easily view the newest additions.

Something similar to the "Last Updated" column for the Historical Record Collections:

Thanks

MandyShaw1

Fantastic idea. (And what about records that are recently changed, i.e. via an index edit? It would be brilliant to see those also.)

I'd suggest you separate the 'sorting' aspect into a separate thread since that could apply to any column - the ability to sort the results (like on e.g. Find My Past) would be a massive usability improvement.

Paul W

Apart from the "clutter" this would probably cause on the right side of the results page, I wonder of what benefit this would be? Also, where would this "addition date" be found? I just looked at a source I had added to an ID in 2015, yet the date in the Citation is for October 2023!

I don't think FamilySearch would be willing to share the exact dates records have been added, in the same way we cannot find out even general details of what has been added to a collection, and when. Take your example above: it shows collections that were updated on 26 February 2024, but I challenge you to discover the exact details of these updates. In some cases they might relate to just minor changes (possibly via an update from a third-party provider), in others a record might have been temporarily withdrawn and now made available again in the exact same form (on FamilySearch). So, should the original date the record was added be shown, or the one when it was "reinstated"?

In short, even if a database could be searched for such detail (when added) I don't think it would be too meaningful, given that there has been multiple indexing / duplication of some records, each "source" showing identical information.

MandyShaw1

@Paul W the aim here, I think, is to find out easily what records/metadata have changed for a particular search since the last time it was run - surely this is something people would frequently want to do.

FS are clearly in possession of all this date information even if they aren't in a position to expose it to us.

Maybe another way of doing it would be to allow the user to subscribe somehow to a particular Records search?

Incidentally, from what I can see, the Collection last modified date is not always meaningful - on some Collections the last modified date appears to change when the metadata is edited, while on others (censuses in particular) it doesn't seem to.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

I'm with Paul on this one. The exact dates of added or changed collections are not readily available, meaning that pulling that information into the search results grid would not be a trivial task.

I'd rather FS spend its finite resources on fixing the elements we know are not working.

The index (what we see in the search results) is a finding aid, and every detail cannot/should not be on the grid.

Gail Swihart Watson

@Paul W Up until a few months ago the image collections found in Search - Images had dates displayed as to when the collections were added, just like the above image. I know, I have a screen shot. I used this to warn people that there were a lot of image collections NOT to be found in the catalog, and it is always smart to look in both catalog and images. It used to be that I could tell people that some time around 2021 the catalog stopped being updated, and indeed, during that presentation I provided screen shots of comparison between catalog and images for a very specific location. You could see what was missing from the catalog and what their dates added were.

Now that the date added is no longer being displayed in the search images option, you have to pay much more attention on comparing the two if you are looking for information not found in the catalog.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Quoth @MandyShaw1, optimistically: "FS are clearly in possession of all this date information".

Are they, though? Computers only know what they're told. When new index entries are added to a collection, that adds some lines to the indexed records database, but does that automatically correspond with an updated "date last changed"? Does someone regularly run queries on how many lines and dates added?

I think my old characterization of FS's vast holdings still holds: nobody can keep track of what all they have, including FS itself.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

The citation information also has changed a few times over the years. At one point, the auto-generated citation included the date accessed - that is the date you or I looked at the record and printed a copy or saved it to a profile.

Then, a few years ago (2016), the auto-text changed to the date the record set had been last updated. For quite some time, as the change was rolled out, the date became meaningless as there was not consistency.

I spent a LOT of time contacting FS Support trying to get to the bottom of the change. I finally got a reply indicating that unnamed professional genealogists had demanded the change.

As a result, I put no faith in the date in that auto-generated citation. It's a date. Beyond that, who knows what it indicates.

MandyShaw1

I do see what you both mean, but I am talking lower level (one example: in the JSON version of any record it is possible to see individual timestamps for Created and Modified on each item of the indexed data, in addition to the timestamp at a higher level that matches the date/time string shown on the citation).