Open Data and Family History

In the UK, genealogy and family history has always been considered a pastime or hobby of the recently retired. However there in the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in the subject, due partly to media coverage (via programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are, BBC1) that shift the emphasis onto personal heritage, encompassing an emotional and geographical journey to discover and engage with ones roots, thus experiencing history from the ’bottom up’ in a relevant, contextual, emphathetic and skills-based way; and increasingly because the Internet has brought millions of digitised datasets, indexes and transcriptions, previously locked away in archives, into the homes of a new generation of history explorers. Combined, this has created an entirely new landscape in which a range of modern historians operate alongside the dataset holders and the commercial companies that provide the means of access to digitised records, and this presentation will explore the genesis of this environment, the impact on how history is researched and disseminated, and the challenges ahead. For example, there are concerns about how issues such as open data and access to material are dealt with in an increasingly monetised space, so groups such as the Open Genealogical Alliance have formed to look at alternative outcomes to the ones being created at the moment.