The digitizing of genealogical records contained on millions of rolls of film stored in the Granite Mountain Vault Records facility of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is getting faster by the day. What was initially estimated to take 120 years is now expected to take 30, and possibly as little as 10 years to complete.

So, how does it work? Brittany Karford gives an excellent overview in News from the Church:

One vault worker loads rolls of film into a pod of scanners and presses “Go”. The scanner then takes one comprehensive video picture and transfers that continuous file to another computer, where an application analyzes the contrast of the ribbon for quality and splits each frame into individual JPEGs (a digital file of an image). To finish, a good pair of eyes reviews the job and processes the newly created JPEGs. The digital images are then readied for use by the Church's online indexing program, where volunteers over time will help extract the birth, marriage, and death information from the images to create free searchable indexes online (like the 1880 U.S., 1880 Canada, and 1881 British Censuses currently found at FamilySearch.org).

Online access to these millions of valuable genealogy records is a dream come true for genealogists around the world. Ever since the FamilySearch Indexing project announcement at the 2005 FGS Conference the genealogy world has been buzzing!