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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

"just has to scan and OCR"

Yeah, just OCR badly hand-written text. That's a hard problem! I've run across matches in the census data that I would consider illegible, but that somehow got matched with the right name.

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There are thousands of volunteers doing this "mechanical Turk"-like work at a pretty impressive pace. http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progre...

Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time.

Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n...

Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)

Is the data available to outside organizations or is it kept internally with the church?

Yes, see https://familysearch.org

Yeah, they have no reason to keep it secret. They are gathering it for their own odd purpose but that doesn't preclude sharing it.

Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).

The LDS Church does employ many developers, but they also benefit from a lot of volunteer contributions.

They have a neat program for organizing volunteer efforts:

https://vineyard.lds.org/

Minor nitpick: for machine-reading hand-written text, the process is actually called ICR - Intelligent Character Recognition.

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