Footnote to History

December 18, 2007 8:35 PM

Footnote (mentioned previously but briefly on MeFi) is trying to be the latest big destination for history buffs and family historians on the web, where... "you can view the most exciting original source documents," over 22 million of 'em, some of which are "available for the first time on the internet"! Sure, you have to pay to get to a bunch of the genealogy stuff, but they've also got digital scans of lots of cool American history documents for FREE! A current, more-or-less chronological list of the free docs follows...

Of course there's the classic "American Milestone Documents" like the good ol' Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address, but there's also George Washington's Correspondence, collected papers of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, early records from the Pennsylvania Archives, and - rather idiosyncratically - town records from Hancock and Goffstown, NH.

*However, by far the coolest free historical docs there may be the Lincoln Assassination Papers and Project Blue Book's UFO Investigations!*

But wait, there's more!! Read 'em and then comment on 'em, in sorta an "Ancestry meets Wikipedia" kinda way on Footnote, where "original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past." Enjoy!!

posted by Misciel (8 comments total)

Does any docs on Footnote actually have comments?
posted by smackfu at 9:13 PM on December 18, 2007

Footnote appears to be a private company that is digitizing select NA content. Here are the terms of the deal. It says "After an interval of five years, all images digitized through this agreement will be available at no charge through the National Archives website." OK - but, all images are already free since they are in the public domain. One only needs to subscribe, spider the entire site, upload it to Internet Archive, and Footnote is out of a business model. Not that I advocate this because it's great to see NA putting stuff online, even if it means we have to wait 5 years for it to become free. They are doing something similar with their video collection and Amazon.
posted by stbalbach at 9:21 PM on December 18, 2007

How did they convince the NA to allow them to do that? Because they were willing to do the scans? I'll bet others (google?) would've done em for free.
posted by cell divide at 9:40 PM on December 18, 2007

It's a non-exclusive agreement, so presumably Google or anyone else could come in and scan them.
posted by smackfu at 9:52 PM on December 18, 2007

@cell divide: Anyone can duplicate things at the National Archives (I have done it, as a researcher). As long as it's in the public domain, it can be reproduced anywhere. Since the items can't be removed from the National Archives, there is some investment in reproducing them - either the investment of using their copiers/video reproduction machines/and so forth or of sending in researchers with scanners/digital cameras/etc.

It is also totally legal for them to charge for access. Technically, they're not charging for the document, but for their reproduction of same. It's why the British Museum can charge exorbitant fees for a photo of the Rosetta Stone - while the Rosetta Stone is in the public domain, photographs of it are the property of the British Museum. (They also charge very high fees if you want to take photos of it for a tv/movie/book production - and the reflective glass casing around the Rosetta Stone makes tourist photos unusable.)

I could go on and on and ON about copyright law, public domain, and all the loopholes, but it would be of interest to about three people, and would turn into a big ol' rant. Spent a lot of time doing clearances for documentary TV, and at times I was driven to tears of frustration.
posted by rednikki at 9:35 AM on December 19, 2007

There is some great stuff there and the ability to annotate the documents and share the annotations is a breakthrough idea for digital archives. But the search feature is crude, and it is search that makes or breaks a digital archive.
posted by LarryC at 9:37 AM on December 19, 2007

There is some great stuff there and the ability to annotate the documents and share the annotations is a breakthrough idea for digital archives

Well, except Ancestry has been doing this for some time.

But the search feature is crude, and it is search that makes or breaks a digital archive

Agreed. I searched for some family names, and I'd either come up with some massive results (search by a single AND or OR option for terms isn't enormously powerful), or those results I did find were completely useless to me (Yea, an empty naturalization card for my gg-grandfather doesn't seem worth 1.95 to me).
posted by thanotopsis at 10:59 AM on December 19, 2007

As a professional historian, I agree that it would be lovely to have millions of documents digitized simply for the worthy goal of the edification of the masses, but unfortunately governments tend not to invest as much public moneys as they should in maintaining their own documentary heritage. So, the Footnote.com-National Archives deal actually seems like a decent solution to making digitalization of historical documents financially attractive for private companies.

However, if you've got a better idea, don't just kvetch! You can apply for a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission with "proposals that use cost-effective methods to digitize nationally-significant historical record collections and make the digital versions freely available on the Internet."

On a side note, Footnote's apparently aware of their Achilles' heel, that is, the problems with searches, and are working to try to improve them with advanced search options...
posted by Misciel at 8:03 PM on December 28, 2007