SELLING HISTORY, PART 2
Feb 19th, 2009 | By jonetta rose barras | Category: Featured ArticleDISTRICT officials confirmed this week that they are “taking a look” at a proposal presented to them by The Generations Network, which owns and operates among other sites Ancestry.com.
“At this point, the office is neither moving forward nor disregarding [the proposal],” said mayoral spokesperson Mafara Hobson.
Gary Gibbs, vice president for content for Ancestry.com, during a telephone interview with me, said his company approached the District government but the two are “not even close to a deal.” He said he provided the city with a “prototype” of what a deal might look like, and disputed reports that TGN is or ever was affiliated with the Mormon Church. However, published articles in 2007, record the longstanding relationship with the company and the church’s family history centers.
As for the District, Gibbs explained that TGN offered to digitize the city’s archives at no charge to the government. The District would receive a copy of the digitized files for its use. The city would retain “original rights” to the materials. But TGN/Ancestry.com would receive a “sub-license” to the rights, allowing it to sell access to the materials, explained Gibbs.
While use of the city’s archives might be free of charge now to District residents, if the city moves forward with TGN proposal that would change. Any individual accessing the system outside of the city’s archives would have to pay for access.
“We get Ancestry.com, and we pay a pretty penny. They charge you for everything and we get calls all the time,” one District resident told me.
“We recoup our funding by selling access,” Gibbs said, adding that annual membership is about $150 for full access to the system; worldwide access is about $300. A subscription for one-month use is $20.
Gibbs was unable to say definitively how much money TGN estimates it would make from sub-licensing part of the proposal. But he agreed that the company generally operates in a “profitable” way.
He called the TGN proposal a “wonderful deal for the archives,” but agreed that the government could digitize its own files. “Absolutely it could do it.”
It’s unclear what will happen next. But the topic is likely to be on the agenda of the oversight briefing of the Office of the Secretary that D.C. Council member Mary Cheh has scheduled for Monday, Feb. 23.
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Currently there is no access outside the city’s archives, right? So the change would be that people would have more convenient access if they paid for it, while the option of going to the archives to search for free would still exist. And apparently the free research at the archive would include new online searching of the documents. If that’s the situation, it doesn’t sound so bad.
Can you clarify the “original rights”? If some other company comes along later and wants to do something similar, can DC make a sublicense deal with them also?
Jonetta, when you have related articles like this, it’s good to include a link to the previous article (which can’t even be found through the tags, since the two articles have different tags).
As a former librarian at the Library of COngress who worked on the first massive digitization profects of American history (“American Memory”) I am appalled at this suggestion. It controls access to public information and sets up barriers between ordinary people and their heritage. On top of this, it makes access to these records extremely expensive for freelance writers and researchers, not to mention investigstive reporters. At a time, especially in DC of widening distances between the rich and the poor- putting intellectual capital of this sort beyond the reach of so many is the height of social irresponsibility. it also suggests to me that the control of archival information has slipped beyond control of professional archivists and that their impact on this emerging policy counts for very little.
I have no objections to Ancestry.com serving as a contractor, but hope that DC would value its identity and service mission ehough to shelve this misguided proposal.
Elisabeth Higgins Null
Null Editorial Services
706 Bonifant Street
Silver Spring, MD. 20910
enul@starpower.net
As an employee of The Generations Network, I’m disheartened by the inaccuracies in the last two posts on this topic (see the previous post from Saturday at http://jrbarras.com./site/?p=288). I hope to help clarify several points for you and your readers.
The Generations Network, owner of Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online resource for family history, is only in preliminary stages of discussions with the DC archives, so I don’t have specific comments about a possible deal with them.
That being said generally, a deal that Ancestry.com would create with an archive or institution would allow our company access to the publicly available archive records in whatever form (microfilm, books, papers) so we could make digital copies of those records. The records themselves always remain the property of the archive.
These kinds of arrangements provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of digitizing and indexing costs to an archive for no cost (or significantly reduced cost depending on the deal) in return for us having the rights to post the information on Ancestry.com for our members.
It is true that governments (local, state or federal) could digitize their own records, and some are. However, given archive budgets across the country and world, large digitization projects often would not happen without our involvement.
Though the article implies free access to the records would go away within the DC archives, we never intend or plan on less access to records. On the contrary, the archive office would have the original records, a digital copy of the records, and Ancestry.com access in their office as well. Archives can allow free access to any/all of those options at their choosing. Plus, millions of people across the world will have access to that same information on Ancestry.com by subscription.
On a separate note, I also feel the need to clarify that our company has not been previously and is not currently owned by or affiliated with the Mormon Church. We have business relationships with the Church in the same way we have mutually beneficial relationships with other churches, religious organizations, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and state and local governments across the world. Our majority owner is Spectrum Equity out of Menlo Park, California and Boston, Massachusetts. http://tgn.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=111
There are millions of people who are interested in discovering their family history, but don’t have the means to access records that can fill in the gaps. It is unfortunate that the two articles posted seemed to be an attempt to create controversy on a possible relationship that would provide online access to records that help tell the history of many of the District of Columbia’s past and current residents.
Mike Ward
Director of Public Relations
Ancestry.com
The Generations Network
While this may sound appalling on the surface it is actually very beneficial. As KC mentioned there currently is no access outside the archives. For those unable to make the trip it might be worth it to pay for access. The archives are still free if you want to walk in and do research. This is an added service; it isn’t replacing a service. As Mike Ward mentioned NARA has a very successful relationship with TGN. Through the partnership researchers can now go to any NARA facility and access records digitized by TGN/Ancestry.com that may be located hundreds/thousands of miles away, not to mention having the ability to keyword search. DC should seriously consider this as a way to open up their archives.