Relaxing Restricted Access due to FHC closures

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: It has been announced that FHCs will be closing temporarily due to the ongoing pandemic.
There has been interest in the genealogical community about whether restrictions on viewing records only at a FHC could be relaxed during this time.

Obviously negotiations with record custodians would need to take place. For very small record sets it wouldn't be worthwhile doing this, but for larger record sets such as the UK censuses, and for all the records that come from Ancestry.com, this would be economical.

Personally, I don't think FS and record custodians would ever agree to this, and I don't think it would unreasonable of them to refuse, unless the closures went on longer than about a month.

But I would still be interested in what the response of FS is to this question.

LegacyUser

Slotbuddy said: In our area we only have access to the local FHC one day a week as it is and now with even that closed, we have nothing. However, getting places like ancestry.com who depend on that income for their livelihood is doubtful.

However, we can only hope such an arrangement might be agreeable if they knew it would only be temporary.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: That would be pretty cool. Disney released Frozen 2 earlier than predicted on Disney+ so it is a possibility.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: I fear that this is somethimg where people will just have to Let It Go.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: :-)

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: lol

LegacyUser

S. said: I feel your Pain. all I can say is good luck,

LegacyUser

Juli said: Re: pay sites, the biggest Hungarian pay repository (Arcanum) has just announced that they're making most of their services free of charge for the next month, due to the quarantine. (The only service they're not opening is downloads, although you can get an individual page.)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Face-palm

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: In order to be frozen, it would have to be "pretty cool"...

LegacyUser

Juli said: Given the pun you committed up-thread, you're a fine one to talk, Jeff.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yup. I had to get even with David.

It was instinctive :-)

LegacyUser

FamilySearch Moderator said: Thank you for your inquiry and suggestion. We have had several requests in this regard as a result of the temporary closing of our Family History Library and family history centers due to COVID-19 precautions. Due to contractual obligations, we unfortunately cannot offer expanded external access to records restricted to family history centers and affiliate libraries. We apologize for this inconvenience.

In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the vast record collections that are available on FamilySearch. Millions of new indexed records and images are added weekly. And if you haven’t used our new Explore Historical Images tools, you might be surprised at the potential discoveries you can make in our growing unindexed image collections.

We appreciate your patience, loyalty, and support,

FamilySearch Support

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: Thank you for the response.

I personally have no issues with this decision for now. This is a difficult situation for everyone. I asked the question because I knew a lot of others were interested. Only if the situation continued for many weeks/months would it then in my view be a good idea for FS to try and negotiate temporarily relaxed access restrictions for larger/more popular record sets.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I concur with AvH - and thank you for responding - it really makes a difference, even if the answer is no.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Yes I'll also agree with that as well. An expected answer, but having official word to point people to is immensely helpful whatever the answer is.