As the librarian for the Los Angeles Jewish Genealogical Society of Los
Angeles I spend a lot of time at our local Family History Center. I have
been asked on numerous occasions whether (and when) the Salt Lake City,
Utah, based Family History Library will be converting their resources to CD
or digital format.

The latest "skinny" is that they are presently planning to convert all of
their microfilm collection to digital images. They have been working on it
since September of 2005 and they are presently projecting that they will
have the project completed in six years (more or less.) As the materials
are scanned, they will be put on their website for all of us to access.

In addition, they are also digitizing published family histories--starting
with those that are out of copyright. About 5,000 were on-line as of
September 1st and they are digitizing about 100 volumes per week.

The URI for this materials is www.lib.byu.edu

As the material goes on-line, they are creating links >from the material to
the digitized website. You can do a preliminary hunt by following these
directions:

1) Go to www.familysearch.org
2) Click on Family History Library Catalog (one of the tabs on the top of
the page)
3) Click on Author Search
4) Type in [for example] Potter, then Lucy
5) Click on Potter, Lucy Closson Austin
6) Click on the title
7) Scroll down to red, which says "To view a digital version of the this
book, click here."

You can search for names, photographs, maps, etc. in the BYU Digitalized
records at the following site:

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cgi-bin/advsearch.exe

I hope this information is helpful in your research.

Barbara Algaze Los Angeles, California Algaze@comcast.net