Ancestry.com has had an agreement with NARA to scan documents on-site at the National Archives since May of 2008. They have now obtained permission to scan at their own facility off-site, which they believe will allow the digitization of 5 times as many paper records – with the capacity to scan at least 5 million documents per year.
This is big news folks… All scanning of paper documents by commercial entities to this point have been limited to on-site work, with all the space and time constraints that go with it. This agreement should allow many more documents to be scanned and made available in the near future.
The following press release was received from Anastasia Tyler at Ancestry.com this morning.
PROVO, Utah, October 6, 2009 – Ancestry.com today announced an expansion to their relationship with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that enables the company to digitize NARA record collections at a new Ancestry.com facility in the Washington, D.C., area. The new facility will help bring millions of new NARA documents online for the first time.
Ancestry.com currently has the largest online collection of digitized and indexed NARA content, including the complete U.S. Federal Census Collection, 1790-1930, passenger lists from 1820-1960 and WWI and WWII draft registration cards.
“Our ten-year relationship with NARA goes far beyond digitizing documents,” said Tim Sullivan, CEO, Ancestry.com. “The new facility and expanded relationship with the National Archives enables us to scan millions of paper records, carefully preserved for decades at NARA, and put them online to help millions of Americans more easily unlock the stories of their family’s past.
Since the signing of an agreement in May 2008, Ancestry.com has been working with NARA to digitize historical records collections on-location at NARA’s archive in Maryland. This is the first time NARA has partnered with a commercial entity to have documents scanned off-site. The new scanning facility will allow Ancestry.com to digitize more than five times the records than it could at the NARA archive, with the capacity to scan at least 5 million documents, many still in paper form, each year.
“Considering the enormous number of historical records housed at NARA archives across the country, the cost is too great for us to digitize the documents on our own,” said James Hastings, Director of Access Programs at NARA. “Our relationship with Ancestry.com allows us to drastically increase the rate of digitizing records in a fiscally responsible fashion and helps us provide the public with even greater access to America’s treasured collections.”
To celebrate this growing relationship with NARA, Ancestry.com has launched two collections that were a part of the May 2008 partnership announcement: Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1963-1974, which have not been available to the public outside of NARA research rooms and Honolulu Passenger Lists, 1900-1953, which have not been available online until now..
I will write separate posts about the two new online collections, as well as others…
