There's a revolution right now in genealogy, and it is coming from a number of fronts," says Rich Running. His part in the revolution is to provide what he calls "the bathrobe experience." Picture, if you will, an army of pajama-clad researchers.

As head of product management for the Family History department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Running's job is to take the Church's 2 1/2 million rolls of microfilm and another 1 1/2 million microfiches and scan all those billions of birth and marriage and death records and get them on the Internet.

Running wants everyone who owns a computer to be able to access all the Church's records from their homes — late at night, early in the morning, any time they want. No more getting cleaned up and combing your hair and driving to your nearest family history library.

In a free public lecture, Running will explain how the LDS Church is progressing in the effort to digitize the records. He'll speak on Tuesday at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City as part of the annual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, presented by the Utah Genealogical Association.

This is the Institute's 12th year. Marilyn Markham, president of the UGA, says the Institute draws amateur and professional genealogists from around the United States and even from other countries.

The UGA is a nondenominational organization and has had board members belonging to faiths other than LDS. However, Markham says, the big draw for the Salt Lake Institute, as compared to other genealogy conferences, is the proximity of the LDS Church's Family History Library. Most of those who come to the five-day conference will spend their mornings in classes at the hotel and their afternoons just a block away at the Family History Library.

Utahns who haven't signed up for the $345 Institute can still hear experts, including Running, at a series of evening lectures.

Karen Clifford, a local genealogist, will be the banquet speaker. She'll talk about some of the funny findings — including a headstone that not only gave the name and birth and death dates of the man, but also listed his widow's address and noted that she "yearns to be comforted."

Clifford will also talk about some of the more humorous mistakes people made when they were learning to do genealogy. When the electronic sources first came online, she says, beginning researchers found families they thought they were related to and disseminated the wrong information much more widely than they'd ever been able to before. A woman with a common name might be said to be the mother of more than 100 children.

The mistakes were amusing — but also frustrating for the researchers who came later and had to sort out the mess. Clifford is pleased to report that more and more people are being taught the proper way to do research. Today's beginners make fewer mistakes than beginners made 15 years ago, she says.