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

Thu Oct 14 13:35:07 UTC 2010

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Graham Seaman <graham at theseamans.net> wrote:
>  On 09/24/10 22:15, Tom Morris wrote:
>
>> I don't know if it's the reason behind FreeBMD's licensing, but
>> historically the genealogical community has been gun shy of commercial
>> ventures due to past bad experiences snarfing up freely provided data
>> and then putting it behind pay walls and selling it back to the people
>> that provided it.  That, and the sleazy business practices of
>> companies like Ancestry have probably left a bad taste in people's
>> mouths about commercial usage.  I think the objections can be overcome
>> if the arguments are framed correctly, but it'll take some work.
>>
>> Tom
>>
> 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).

Note that this statement was most likely written many years prior to
any UK open gov/open data initiatives being a glimmer in anyone's eye.
 Anyone writing in the same time period would likely have said it
would be a cold day in hell before any government collected geo data
was freely available.

The social/cultural uniqueness of the genealogical community is still
relevant, but it could well be that if you convinced the FreeBMD
leadership of the merit of asking, they'd be able to get the
government to change the terms of the agreement without as much
difficulty as was historically believed to be true.

> 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

The counter argument to this is that increased availability and
awareness of the documents generates a larger number advocates (and
voters) to lobby for continued or increasing funding.  People don't
like paying for dusty old documents that sit neglected in a vault, but
it can be quite a different story for things which are used on a daily
basis by thousands of passionate voting lobbyists.

> - 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
> 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.

Not all of this is intentional.  Some is just a lack of knowledge.  I
still see people hand transcribing pages from local history/genealogy
books even when those same pages are available in Google Books.
Cemetery transcriptions may still be done in Word rather than Excel
or, shock, horror, a real database just because that's what's most
accessible and familiar.

Having said that, there's is a significant undercurrent of people not
wanting their data "stolen" by others -- and not just commercial
interests.  Troll any genealogy forum and there are always complaints
of some ancestor or other stealing "their" data.  I think the solution
to this is part technological, part social.  If there was a strong
culture of attribution and the technical underpinnings to make it
easy, I think an education campaign could be mounted to get people to
publish early so that they get credit for their work.

> Like Tom suggests, tread carefully or you may alienate the very people
> who should be natural okf supporters.

Absolutely, but I'm not saying to not try or that it's not a
worthwhile goal.  I'm happy to help anyone who wants to work in this
space.

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 4:41 AM, graham <graham at theseamans.net> wrote:

> There is also an insidious overuse of copyright by people who should
> know better - this summer I was asked to sign a form recognising an
> archive's copyright over a document from 1670, when I wanted to take a
> photo of it (there are several perfectly valid reasons for not allowing
> photos to be made but copyright really isn't one). Many people in
> genealogy, and even some archivists, have come to believe that copyright
> law is something it really isn't.

Are you sure the archive was asserting copyright?  It's not uncommon
for libraries and archives to make stipulations like this in their
membership or reader card/researcher agreements.  It has nothing to do
with copyright and under the guise of contract law, they can basically
make whatever demands they want in return for permission to research
in the archives.  You have the choice of agreeing to the conditions
(and being bound by them) or finding a different place to research.  I
think it sucks too, but it's certainly well within the bounds of the
law (as I understand it, not being a lawyer).

Tom