Word is slowly spreading about Ancestry.com's new grant program for state archives. Ancestry is promising to provide $1.5 million dollars in digitization services (though no money) to state repositories. Best of all, it has promised to keep the application requirements simple. The program is described at http://www.ancestrydps.com/programs.htm.
No archives has enough money for digitization, so the natural question to ask is whether this is a good deal for archivists and for the public. Unfortunately, the terms described in the agreement appear to be a step back from the terms Ancestry recently negotiated with NARA. And even those terms came under sharp criticism. Archivists thinking about the Ancestry program may wish to move cautiously.
While Ancestry calls its new program a "grant" program, in spirit it is much closer to the collaborative agreements it has signed with other repositories, most notably NARA. (NARA's agreement with Ancestry's parent, TGN, is found at http://www.archives.gov/digitization/tgn-agreement.pdf.) In practice, there is little difference between NARA's partnership and the activities to be undertaken in the state grant program. The big difference is that the partnership had to be negotiated and NARA could demand certain terms, while Ancestry gets to stipulate the terms of its "grant" program.
So what has Ancestry left out of its "grant" program that is found in NARA's agreement? The big difference concerns the scope of Ancestry's rights in the digitized documents. For example, in NARA's agreement, only Ancestry can provide online access to the material for the first five years. NARA can, however, sell copies of portions (but not all) of the digitized records on DVD or CD-ROM so long as there is an accompanying license agreement limiting further distribution of the material. In the state grant program, archives can only use the images for internal purposes for the first 5 years.
After 5 years, NARA has full rights to use the digitzed content however it wants, including publishing it online themselves, selling the content, or providing it to a 3rd party. The state grant program is less generous: the Archives can publish the information on its own web site after 5 years, but it cannot provide it to 3rd party web sites (such as the Internet Archive or the Open Content Alliance). Since much of the interest in digital preservation is focused on shared digital repositories (see, for example, the recent announcement of the HATHI Trust), this limitation could become a serious impediment. Nor can the archives provide copies of indexes created as part of the project to 3rd parties (such as Google), which could seriously limit the public's ability to discover digitized archival records.
The restrictions on NARA's use of the digitized materials, which I always felt represented a reasonable balance between public interest and Ancestry's need to recoup its digitization investment, met with much criticism. See, for example, The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent and the debate at the ArchivesNext blog. In addition, the OCLC/RLG report on considerations in commercial-noncommercial partnerships in mass digitization recommended that while commercial partners may need exclusive rights to digital files for a period of time, ultimately the repository should assume unlimited ownership.
There are many areas discussed in the OCLC/RLG report that are not touched on in the grant terms. For example, will patron confidentiality and anonymity be protected when access to government records is through a commercial site? And while I am sure that Ancestry will digitize to the best of its ability, there is no discussion of the technical standards it will follow. SInce it is unlikely that much of this material will be digitized again, it is probably wise to make sure that it is done right the first time.
It is really hard for cash-strapped archives to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyone who has been involved in a digital project knows, however, that creating the scans is the simplest (and cheapest) part of the project. The real money comes in preparing material for scanning (if it has not already been filmed), shipping and reshelving it, and preparing metadata. Any archives that participates in the grant program is going to make a substantial contribution of its own funds. It had best make sure that the resulting product is worth the substantial investment.
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