New FHL Catalog website

A while back I remember reading something about how a certain company was taking over the task of updating FamilySearch.org's FHL Catalog - or something to this effect. Does anyone have any additional information about this? Are they having a beta test for the new catalog, and where can we send suggestions for improvements?

I am a little frustrated at some of the limitations of the FamilySearch wiki project, and would hope that some aspects of the wiki medium would be incorporated into the new FHL Catalog. I would like to see the FHL Catalog allow users to comment on or give further description, ratings, hints, or such about books or microfilm.

BradJackman wrote:A while back I remember reading something about how a certain company was taking over the task of updating FamilySearch.org's FHL Catalog - or something to this effect. Does anyone have any additional information about this? Are they having a beta test for the new catalog, and where can we send suggestions for improvements?

I am a little frustrated at some of the limitations of the FamilySearch wiki project, and would hope that some aspects of the wiki medium would be incorporated into the new FHL Catalog. I would like to see the FHL Catalog allow users to comment on or give further description, ratings, hints, or such about books or microfilm.

Here is the announcement from FamilySearch.

Here is a blog postabout the agreement from Paul Allen founder of FamilyLink.

I think this blog post answers some of your questions.

From Paul Allen's blog, concerning the new FHL Catalog:

"Users will be able to add new sources that are [not] currently in the library catalog, and thus extend its scope of coverage. They will be able to improve the source descriptions, and even rate and review sources as to their usefulness.
Whenever a source listed in the catalog has been digitized, and exists somewhere online, there will be links created to the digital version by users or through automation technology that FamilyLink.com will utilize. "

Glad to see someone thinks the way I do.

Long live real research!

When I go to familysearch.org and hold my cursor over "library", a drop box appears with the following options:
Family History Library
Family History Centers
Education
Family History Catalog

As I move the cursor down, the list vanishes. My only option is FHL. The FHL screen responds irregularly (sometimes it moves, and sometimes it doesn't) to the touchpad scrollbar or to keyboard arrows, but will scroll if I grab the screen scrollbar & move it.

I don't see any way to navigate to the catalog.

FYI:
experienced computer user
about 10 years using a laptop w/o a mouse
Windows XP
current laptop about 1 year old
Netscape
The only websites that have problems are nFS & the new old FS.

After reading this description and seeing the similar description from the nFS thread, I'm starting to suspect it's a Javascript issue. My suspicion is there is some out-of-the-ordinary Javascript coding idiom used on on this page and in nFS, and your Netscape browser doesn't like the new idiom. The bad news is the use of that idiom is fairly likely to grow.

Is there any way you can try Firefox? I would think it highly probable that the latest Firefox 2 or 3 release would make the symptoms go away.

I'm wondering if it's an outdated version of Java. I'm religious about updating Java since most of the updates are due to security problems.

Note that just updating might not be enough since by default an update simply installs the new version without removing/overwriting the old version. So to be safe, I always have to go and manually remove old versions of Java.

scion wrote:When I go to familysearch.org and hold my cursor over "library", a drop box appears with the following options:
Family History Library
Family History Centers
Education
Family History Catalog

As I move the cursor down, the list vanishes.

No problem here with Firefox 2 and jre 6. Hover over Library and the drop down box stays until I click on one of the four options. The other menus seem to work, as well, except that I did not check each of them as I did under Library.

When I was using Netscape and the Church went to the new lds.org I had the same problem. The menu would drop down, but the items on the drop down list that were below a certain point could not be accessed. The menu would disappear. It seemed to have something to do with where the next area of the underlying page started. For example, on the main lds.org page the menu would work as long as I was in the blue bar at the top. But, as soon my cursor got to the part of the page under the statue of the Savior, the drop down menu disappeared.

That was when I queried SL about NS and discovered that it would no longer be supported. My guess is that the problem you are having is a NS problem. The problem you describe is the same one I had.

In the interim, try these links:

Family History Library - Click on "Library"
Family History Centers - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library ... et_fhc.asp
Education - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library ... cation.asp
Library Catalog - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library ... t_fhlc.asp

I've been having issues with the new "old" FamilySearch.org site too. I've had it crash on me twice today, doing different things on the website, but each time it crashed right when I moved my cursor over the drop down box from "Search Records". Not sure what's causing it, it doesn't seem systematic, just kind of random. Can't get it to crash on purpose. Using IE7 on a XP Pro machine with the latest Java.

It must be the ghost of FamilySearch past.

Thank you!!!! That works just fine.

RobertRaymondUT wrote:In the interim, try these links:

Family History Library - Click on "Library"
Family History Centers - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library ... et_fhc.asp
Education - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/library ... cation.asp
Library Catalog - http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library ... t_fhlc.asp