[open-bibliography] [pd-discuss] Free BMD and PD Calculators

[Rufus Pollock]

On 27 September 2010 23:49, Graham Seaman <graham at theseamans.net> wrote:
>  On 09/24/10 22:15, Tom Morris wrote:
[...]
>>
> The freebmd faq says:
>
> The ONS granted the right to place the database on the Internet on the
> condition that access to it be free of charge. Any commercialisation of
> the database would require the ONS' prior and very improbable
> authorisation.
>
> (http://www.freebmd.org.uk/FAQ.html#9).

Yes, indeed.

> Public bodies have been so reluctant to allow general access to
> genealogical documents in the past - mainly on the grounds that general
> free availability would remove the revenue they need to preserve old
> documents - that where they do allow limited transcription by
> volunteers, those volunteers will generally self-police and block
> attempts to consolidate the data in any public place. This applies more

Quite. It can be tough for public institutions to find sufficient
funding whether for preservation of digitization.

> to parish registers than the BMDs (but note that freedmb is only a free
> index to the records, and does not have a copy of the records
> themselves). For parish registers and censuses there are freereg.org.uk
> and freecen.org.uk, but there is actually far more transcribed material
> deliberately buried away in member-only yahoo groups etc, representing
> (literally) many person-years of skilled volunteer transcription work.
> Like Tom suggests, tread carefully or you may alienate the very people
> who should be natural okf supporters.

Just to clarify :) I'm not suggesting that it is 'wrong' that the
FreeBMD data (or any other genealogical data) not be open. Only that:

a) share-alike licenses could guard against the kind of
'misappropriation' by commercial concerns that Tom cites as an issue
possibly preventing opening up of data

b) as it stands (and for reasons that may well be outside freebmd's
control), the current freebmd data is not 'open' in the sense of
<http://opendefinition.org/> (which doesn't mean it isn't still
useful!)

Rufus