The gains from digitisation are obvious: vastly widened accessibility; flexible and precise search tools; in some cases, transparency where before there was only opacity. And, of course, the welcome chance to stay at home in your dressing gown and not go blind.
But even where records are free to search in the monetary sense, there is a cost. And as in the real world, the buyer needs to know exactly what the price is. The first law of Fish-in-a-Barrel economics states that unspecified prices can only rise.
So picture this: a giant set of administrative records is created, with thousands of people involved. There are plenty of unavoidable human omissions and mistakes.
This record-set is then transferred to an archives. Inevitably, a few of the originals fall down the back of a chair. The surviving records are then microfilmed – well, most of them. A finding aid is then created to the microfilms. Nearly all of the microfilms.
Years later, these microfilms are digitised, but only the ones covered by the incomplete finding aid. The images are then transcribed – with just a few missed – by people who have no knowledge of the subject.
Then the transcripts are turned into a searchable database by people who know nothing about administrative records and couldn’t give a hoot abut history.
The wonder is that anything useful could emerge from such a process. But this is a description of the creation of an important genealogy website.
The explosion of online access to records is unambiguously wonderful, but it comes at a cost. Every human intervention adds another layer of error, with incremental losses to accuracy and completeness.
It is almost always a price well worth paying. But we should never forget that we are paying it.
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