A campaign to get free community access to the register of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean has borne fruit after the intervention of petitioner Martin Booth, community worker Arthur Torrington and over 9000 supporters.
Several months ago the [UK] Prime Minister rejected a petition to “Give African descendants free access to slavery records” arguing that the original versions of these records are available for anyone to go and see, free of charge, at The National Archives’ reading rooms in Kew.
In response, Arthur Torrington, secretary of the Equiano Society and the Windrush Foundation wrote a letter to the government stating; “Free online access may be regarded as a form of reparation for the cruelty and injustice by the British in the era of African enslavement. Saying that the government considered that free access “would incur significant cost” highlights the disregard for the hurt felt by our ancestors and their descendants at the hands of the British. Your statement ignores the many billions of pounds (£) earned by British traders/traffickers who relied on the forced labour of African prisoners. This country’s wealth was built on that labour.”
The website requires users to register with its American parent company [Ancestry.com] that owns the data but after that access is free....
Comments
The Ligali story says that the data are owned by Ancestry.com. But I don't understand that. The data must be in the public domain, and it appears that the original paper documents are in the custody of the UK National Archives. I can't tell in what sense Ancestry.com has an ownership claim here, although I can understand why it might require registration in exchange for hosting the files.
The Ligali story also suggests, without quite asserting, that the UK government paid to digitize the records. Can anyone confirm that UK taxpayers footed the bill? If so, why aren't the files hosted by the UK government with no access restrictions for users, perhaps as another OA collection of the National Archives?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/17/2008 12:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
