Search for our dead
LegacyUser
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Christian Aliposa Basarte said: Regarding your notice about the limited access to historical records, I think that this quarantine period is the best time to offer, explore and index historical records given the available time that we have at our disposal. You must sieze the oppurtunity.
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Comments
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A van Helsdingen said: FamilySearch does not own any of the records on the website. It must negotiate with the record owners or other third parties such as Ancestry.com and FindMyPast to be allowed to publish records.
As you'd be aware after reading the notice, some records require you to be a FHC, Affiliate Library or be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to view the records. This is due to contracts with the record custodians/owners. FS cannot break these contracts even in unusual circumstances. One organisation that did, the Internet Archive, found itself in massive trouble when it made a large collection of literature that was copyrighted freely available online because it wanted to help people who couldn't visit their local library or bookstore.
Ancestry.com made a special deal with the US National Archives (NARA) to make some records free during the pandemic, and the UK National Archives voluntarily opened up access to some of their records (not the ones on FS). FS however has not announced that it has been able to persuade a single record custodian to do something similiar. However it must be remembered that this is a difficult task and even if they had been successful it probably would have been for a small number of very popular records. For that reason, some users of this forum passionately believe that FS should not try to open up access to records during the pandemic and should instead focus on other priorities.
Indexing can of course continue during the lockdown and hopefully the number of records indexed per day has increased significantly.0 -
Jeff Wiseman said: Here is a post by a FamilySearch Moderator on this subject:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...0