The program provides the flexibility necessary to work with small archives as well as giant repositories, he said. It helps those without any resources to complete the entire imaging, indexing and online posting process, and those with more resources who may simply need help posting information online or driving traffic to their Web site.

Once the church has signed an agreement to work with a specific organization, personnel there "typically want to recruit their own patrons to help them index. But with imaging the documents — taking digital photos of them — we do that for them in almost all cases. ... They want preservation-quality digital images, and we do that better than anybody. We've been doing it for decades," to produce the 2.4 million rolls of microfilm that now reside in the church's Granite Mountain near the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, Anderson said.

FamilySearch can also put indexing projects in progress on its Web site, where volunteers can help index public collections of records. The Revolutionary War records are a "perfect example. We're doing the imaging, posting on our site and will recruit volunteers to help index." An online family history Web site called Footnote.com will create electronic indexes of the records and host the actual images there for public access.

The indexes and images of those records will also be viewable at LDS Family History Centers, as well as at FamilySearch.org.

Anderson said "numerous other national and international projects" of a similar nature are now under development and will be announced as agreements are signed or data is published.

As a result of the "affiliate arrangement," Anderson said FamilySearch.org will "have all the indexes for everything. You can think of it more or less like a Google — you go there to find the source of information you're looking for. Sometimes we're the source, and sometimes a third party is the source."

At least one or two similar agreements are expected to be announced this week in Virginia, Anderson said, noting several of the church's family history specialists are presenting at the conference this week.

While some Web sites may eventually use their information as a money-making enterprise, as commercial family history companies now do, Anderson said the church is not charging partners to help them make their records available.

Church officials have been looking to form such partnerships "for some time now," Anderson said, but have had to push forward the development of technology that would allow it to happen with "the way we scan, photo, transfer and archive. Because some of the necessary technology wasn't available, we had to develop it ourselves."