As part of a planning process leading up to an election to fund an
expansion of the building and the staff, the library identified local
history as a priority for Chelsea area taxpayers and the Family History
Index as a prime candidate for digitization work. At the time, the
professional librarian staff consisted of the director, three department
heads (adult services, youth services, technology services), and a parttime
librarian, leaving few resources to focus on a project of this
scope. In the spring of 2005, the library replaced the departing parttime
librarian with a full-time librarian (the author), adding
additional duties of managing the library’s website and digitizing the
Family History Index.
This paper will describe how a librarian and a team of four dozen
volunteers completed the digitization of 15,000 records from the
Family History Index in just over a year, resulting in a highly usable
database that helped Chelsea District Library earn its distinction of
“Best Small Library in America” for 2008 from Library Journal and
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The first section will describe
preparation for the project, including research in archival standards
and digitization techniques, as well as the recruitment and training of
the volunteer workforce. Section two will describe the decisionmaking
process that went into the choice of open source software in
order to create a user-friendly, free database of the records on a
limited budget, as well as the work of developing and testing the
database itself. Section three will offer an overview of the workflow for
staff and volunteers as they did data entry, scanning, and
proofreading of the records. Finally, the paper will describe the
resulting database, current upkeep and expansion, and how the
project served as a model for additional digitization work.