UK National Archives on Flickr
There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.
But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.
The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).
Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.
Comment by Tom Scheinfeldt — 4:31 pm, 17 July 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Interesting. Is it just Flickr, or is the NA allowing uploading to other services as well?
Comment by sharon — 7:10 pm, 17 July 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Wow, I’d better dig out all those photos I took at TNA a few summers ago…
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 7:11 am, 18 July 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
I think they’re allowing other services too. One of the YA mods said here that “we are happy for contributors to make use of Flickr and other host sites”. Not sure exactly where they draw the line, but presumably they’re OK with any republishing for non-commercial purposes. The official copyright guidance now implies that fees are only charged for commercial use. I’m hoping this means that we’ll be able to use Ben Brumfield’s From the Page software to transcribe NA documents.
Pingback by Carnivalesque 52 « Gilbert Mabbott — 6:39 am, 20 July 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
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