NARA for adults only at .com partner
National Archives Announces New "Service"
According to this posting, the contract between the National Archives and a private contractor for digitization of materials at NARA has terms of service that limits access to adults-only. "You have to be 18 to get an account and under no circumstances may anybody under 13 be allowed to look at archival documents."
Also, access to the images at http://www.footnote.com/nara.php requires a paid membership or you can purchase documents at $1.99 per page.
The National Archives receives a copy of all the digital media for their archives, but the contract prohibits the Internet Archive (or anybody else for that matter) from having a copy of that data.
It is amazing to me how often the government goes down the road of trying to privatize public information.
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NARA/Footnote might be a good thing...
I want to comment on "trying to privatize public data"...
If the government doesn't have the funding or the skills to make these records available electronically, then how is the Footnote deal a bad thing?
Does the Footnote deal change access in a negative way? For example, can I still access NARA records in all the ways I could before the Footnote deal?
If the Footnote deal expands access and provides a valuable NEW service, what's the problem? If it costs me $300 and 12 hours to fly roundtrip from California to NARA and $70 for a hotel to look at 100 pages... versus $200 to do the same thing on-line, that's real value that I'm willing to gladly pay $1.99 per page.
If the Footnote deal provides enhanced searching of record text - meaning I can find what I want more quickly and precisely - then that also makes the $1.99 per page more palatable.
If I am so fortunate to live close enough to NARA to physically visit and access the record collections, and I can still do this the way and at the same cost I used to before the Footnote deal, then what's the problem?
And, speaking from a preservation perspective, the key to preserving anything is to have copies just in case the originals are destroyed or lost. So the Footnote deal creates digital copies which in effect add another level of preservation safety to these records in case of a disaster.
Finally, this deal is not "free" to Footnote. They have a lot of work to do and commitments to keep to NARA. Who knows if the $1.99 per page will pay for the digitization effort. Footnote is taking some risk here.
If Footnote does all this work and spends all this money to digitize the NARA records, why should the Internet Archive or other digital repository be entitled to a copy of the records?
And to the original question of adult access... is adult supervision such a huge access issue? What was the NARA policy regarding physical access to records by minors prior to the Footnote deal? Of course, I'm now curious what is in the NARA records which is so sensitive for under-18 researchers and what initially motivated this particular restriction.
Personally, I think the Footnote deal is a positive thing, but am open to being convinced otherwise.
FWIW, I have no connection of any kind (professional, financial, friends, or family) to Footnote or NARA.
Raise good points re: Footnote, but...
I think you raise some decent points. Without actually seeing the contract that NARA and Footnote signed, it can't be readily seen whether this is a positive or negative.
But if it is similar to the contract that Showtime signed with the Smithsonian, it could be problematic. In that deal, it has been reported that Showtime can veto the use of Smithsonian film footage by other movie makers. A similar provision that allowed Footnote to veto other digitization efforts of NARA data would be a bad thing. Why? Because government records are supposed to be free of copyright and anybody should be able to do anything with them. If one vendor is somehow allowed to be sole digitizer of NARA held documents, that would hind the efforts of others like ones at the National Security Archive or even GPO's digitization partners.
Notice I said could. I don't know what the contract actually says. But a non-competition clause makes sense for a company that expect to charge $1.99 per page. Has anyone seen a copy of the contract or a good report on the exact provisions?
If the Footnote contract doesn't bar others from undertaking similar, even non-profit digitization efforts, then I could see it being acceptable.
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
NARA/Footnote Digitization Agreement
The NARA/Footnote contract is available here:
NARA-iArchives Digitization Agreement
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