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

Thu Sep 23 21:42:23 UTC 2010

Hi there

Jordan explained that for copyright calculator you need authors to have died over 70 years ago, and the FreeBMD has that information, as their gaps are in the more recent records. It could be very useful.

I am afraid that opening up the reuse of BMD will be part of the campaign we are starting. From the little I know so far the licensing they have to transcribe and publish is a bit ad-hoc. 

The General Registrar Office has its own project to digitise BMD indexes, which is on hold pending the spending review, but I haven't found anything about reuse. It seems that these records are outside the PSI re-use regulations.

If you or anyone has any further info on genealogical data I really would appreciate it, as in our Open Data campaign we will be working closely with FreeBMD, so this will be a priority.

They just appointed their first paid staffer as well, so things should get moving around this dataset.

Lets meet soon.

Best, Javi

On 23 Sep 2010, at 18:46, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> On 23 September 2010 18:37, Jordan S Hatcher
> <jordan at opencontentlawyer.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone
> 
> Thanks for the update Jordan. (I've also got some good news regarding
> birth and death date data but that is for a separate thread ...)
> 
>> Not sure if this is a repeat of anything already discussed, but I had a chat with the Open Rights Group's new open data campaigner this week, and in addition to open biblio data, the birth marriage and (importantly) death records at the Free BMD database might be of some benefit:
>> 
>> <http://www.freebmd.org.uk/>
> 
> That data would be much more useful if it were open ;) See the terms
> and conditions:
> 
> <http://www.freebmd.org.uk/terms.html>
> 
> And further summary on CKAN package page:
> 
> <http://ckan.net/package/freebmd>
> 
> <quote>
> 1. FreeBMD is provided free of charge for personal research purposes only.
> 2. Access to the data held by FreeBMD is only permitted manually via
> the search page. The use of front end programs or sites to enter
> search parameters is strictly forbidden
> 3. Data extracted from FreeBMD must not be reproduced in any form.
> </quote>
> 
>> As I understand it, there some additional work being done at the moment to make the BMD records held by UK government, more public, more accurate. and more accessible.
> 
> That would be of great value, especially if the data were open
> (http://opendefinition.org/).
> 
>> Just a thought.  If you think there's some area of open government data that ORG should be working on, I'm sure Javi would appreciate any help.
>> 
>> Javier Ruiz <javier at openrightsgroup.org>
> 
> I'll look to chat with him.
> 
> Rufus
> -- 
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/