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The National Archives to Digitize Part of It’s Holdings
By Kathy Jones-Kristof | May 22, 2008
What a great announcement! A portion of the National Archives‘ massive holdings is going to be digitized by Ancestry.com and uploaded to its online subscription database. Oh happy day!
Although digitizing the National Archives’ records will be a five-year task for Ancestry, their reward will be adding a huge dollop of vital statistics, immigration and military service data to their website. The National Archives will also receive a copy of the digitized records for use in what they are calling “archival control.” Without a doubt, that doesn’t mean free, online, public use. Too bad. However, I understand that the task of digitizing even this small percentage of the National Archives’ wealth of information is a huge undertaking. It requires a lot of money for a job like this and for too long our government has had little interest in improving the archive, library and education systems—which are all interlinked in my opinion—of our country.
It’s sad that the only way to access part of our National Archives’ resources on our home computers will be through a private subscription service, but this current digitizing project by Ancestry.com should be looked at as just the first step to total online access. Perhaps someday the license for Ancestry’s exclusive online use will expire (I don’t know this, I’m only hoping) and this data will be available for everyone to access. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
In the meantime, every year we should all write to the President and our Congressional Representatives to demand there be a huge increase in the national budget for Education and Public Libraries, plus a large allowance so the National Archives can digitize their own records for public use. It’s our History. We should have access to it in more ways than by driving to a Research Room or mailing a request and a check for a copy of one record or by subscribing to a database that many people and public libraries can’t afford.
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Topics: All Levels of Genealogists |
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
[...] Daniel J. Wakin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptA link to the National Archives’ database is on the right. Okay, I’m down off my soapbox now. Back to research help the next time, I promise. ©2008 Genealogy Help and Hints. All Rights Reserved. … [...]