Footnote: a little troubling?

[intertext]

I'm curious to know what the historians on my flist think about Footnote. It purports to be a public web repository for original documents, and also has various web 2.0 features that allow users to make collections, upload things themselves, annotate etc. Apparently they have a "unique relationship" with the National Archives (this is heavily, if

Comments

[oursin]

This sounds more like the, is it Ancestry.com website? which offers something similar, geared to family historians, plus access to digitised census records etc.

With The National Archives (UK) you have to pay for at least some of their digitised resources - when I had occasion to use the 1901 census searching was free, but if you wanted the full entry you had to pay (and I may add that the proofreading was really crap - 'Vova Scotia' for Nova Scotia). I think you also have to pay if you want to download various virtual archives they've created.

I'm in two minds about this. Yes, historical archival material should be free: and mostly it is, if you go and look at the originals yourself. But there are really significant resource issues in doing massive digitisation programmes, and the money has to come from somewhere. Which is why we're seeing a lot of public/private partnership thinggys - I note that eventually the (US) National Archives stuff will be free at point of digital access everywhere

[intertext]

Yes - those are good points; I particularly get the notion of how much it costs to digitize the documents in the first place and maintain the site etc. And you're right about it being something on the order of Ancestry.com. I think my hackles rose because it seemed to be purporting to be something rather more than that. But, there ARE quite a lot of free documents available, and the quality of the viewer is quite good - so maybe it's less problematic than I thought. That's why I asked :)