Interesting Observations on the Historical Record Collections

I get a weekly notice from FamilySearch.org about all of the new or updated Historical Records added by FamilySearch. You might recall that the "Historical Record Collections" are linked from the main "Search" tab on the web pages of the website.

Now, what is interesting is that for the past few weeks all the records being uploaded to the Historical Record Collections are indexes without additional images. At the same time, the number of digital images published only in the FamilySearch Catalog has grown to 746.3 million. I am informed that the total number of images online on FamilySearch.org will soon reach or has reached by the date of this post, 2 billion images. So almost half of those images are available only by searching in the Catalog.

I am supposing that FamilySearch is trying to make the images already in the Historical Record Collections searchable, hence, the addition of indexes to these images. But if you are doing research, you need to realize that if you don't look for records in the Catalog, you will be missing a significant percentage of the total records on the website. This means that searching for records by using a name search is not entirely effective.