Caroline Kimbell, Finding the right balance between digitization and reuse of archives
Caroline Kimbell, Head of Licensing at The National Archives of England and Wales (TNA) with the responsibility for the digitization programme, talked today about the balance and tensions between reuse and digitization of archives.
Caroline started the session by explaining why TNA’s online strategy has not reduced the number of readers coming every year to the institution. There has been a stable number of readers in the past ten years. Indeed, the development of a digitization and online policy at TNA has been going along with the dissemination of archives and family history. Citizens have become curious about these issues, therefore if they can now have access to 80 million of documents there is still 93% left of the collection to discover at TNA!
In order to ensure free public access to the collections, Caroline Kimbell emphasizes the need to create partnerships with different stakeholders (commercial partners, universities, and institutions). These stakeholders can bring innovation and provide funding without putting at risk the digitization of other records which do not have commercial or academic value.
The Licensed Internet Associates’ (LIA) programme contributes to TNA’s digitization policy by ensuring that winning tenderers to digitize content pay an ongoing royalty to TNA based on records sales made from the service, which can be estimated between £1 million and £2 million in revenue per year. Hence, TNA benefits from companies that undertake digitization, whereas companies get content with commercial value. Documents containing names represent the best example of balance between Public interest in family history, and commercial interest in the re-use of archives. TNA is breaking the taboo of selling Public heritage to private companies.
TNA also supports the digitization of records which have neither commercial nor academic value. They have indeed decided to digitize some records due to strategic and historical reasons, e.g. the Royal naval logbook CORRAL project which deals with the digitization of Royal naval books for climate purposes.
TNA’s digitization policy gathers fields known as hermetic: Public service, commercial pragmatism and innovation. It could be interesting to think of the possibility to implement this Anglo-Saxon oriented approach into Latin European countries.
Alice CHATEAU
