[OpenGLAM] Paywalls on digital content

Mon Feb 3 14:40:18 UTC 2014

Ah, yes,

We certainly encounter similar problems here in the US. Particularly
frustrating is the diversity of those private archives and their various
subscription models. If you are doing general background on a community,
time period, trade, etc. it can become prohibitively expensive very quickly.

This isn't universal, of course. The Mormon church has actually done an
astounding job, all politics aside, of providing vast troves of
geneological data to the public for free via https://familysearch.org and
there are others as well.

What I would love to see more of are American universities opening up their
digital archives to the public. I feel uncomfortable saying it, but I would
probably prefer a paywall to the completely closed gates of some of those
institutions. Begging credentialed colleagues for a download or presenting
myself physically all around the country is cumbersome and slow at best.

-Schuyler

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 6:22 AM, Alastair Dunning <
alastair.dunning at theeuropeanlibrary.org> wrote:

>
>
> Dear all,
>
>
>
> There's a very good blog post on issues related to digitised resources
> with paywalls by Andrew Prescott from King's College London
>
>
> http://digitalriffs.blogspot.nl/2014/02/dennis-paywall-menace-stalks-archives.html
>
>
>
> Quite a few GLAMs in the UK have been quite successful in getting private
> funding from genealogy companies for digitised their archives.
> Genealogists, in my experience, are often quite happy to pay for access
> this. But this has a knock on effect on scholarship and researchers, who
> need to access the data in different ways, and also do not have the means
> to pay for it.
>
>
>
> Is this also an issue outside the Anglo-Saxon world ?
>
>
>
> Alastair
>
>
>
>
>
> Alastair Dunning
>
> Programme Manager, The European Library
>
> http://theeuropeanlibrary.org
>
> (Based in the National Library of the Netherlands)
>
> skype: xcia0069
>
> twitter: alastairdunning
>
>
>
>
>
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