Suffolk parish registers to go online?

[The Yokel]

Join the petition to keep Lowestoft RO open.

http://www.rootschat.com/links/01llj/

[Trevor Rix]

The latest information that I have concerning the digitisation of Suffolk parish registers was from Paul West on 10th June 2018. It appears that the project is continually being kicked into the long grass. We family historians need to collectively apply more pressure.

"Many thanks for your recent e-mail dated 23 May to Councillor Tony Goldson. I took over the responsibility for Suffolk Record Offices from Tony at the Council Meeting on 24th May.
 
I agree that digitising the parish registers and making them available online would be an important source of income for the record office and a benefit to family and local historians living within the county and elsewhere who have Suffolk roots.
 
You rightly point out that the last formal reference to this work was in May 2016.  The delay in developing the project is the result of wishing to ensure we get the best possible commercial deal on behalf of Suffolk's residents.  Those record offices that rushed into an early agreement have not received a high rate of royalties.  We have also been discouraged by the low royalties received from the national project with a commercial partner to digitise and make available the school admission registers.
 
Since its launch in June 2016 we have therefore been developing the suffolkarchives.co.uk website to make a smaller series of digital images available to download.  We wanted to test whether it would be possible to do a largescale parish register project in-house, as Essex Record Office did, rather than with a commercial partner to ensure we benefited to the maximum.  Recent projects to digitise the marriage licences and wills have shown us just how much capacity is required.  We have also continued to watch with interest progress with the Family Search pilot in Northumberland to digitise their parish registers without licensing the larger companies.
 
We have also been concentrating on another very important element of the digital strategy, to digitise our existing catalogues and make them available online.  People in Suffolk and across the world want to know what information we hold in the first instance so they can come in to use it, request a search in it or copies from it.  In the digital age people tend to assume that if information is not discoverable online then it does not exist.  85% of the catalogues i.e. 1,177 out of 1,379 describing Lowestoft Record Office collections are for example now online amounting to thousands of individual entries.
 
We hope to resume progress with digitising the parish registers at the earliest opportunity but must ensure that we get the best possible outcome that maximises the income that we generate."

[Trevor Rix]

See https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2353070 for the Family Search pilot in Northumberland to digitise their parish registers. There are 61776 images so far but they cannot be viewed from home. Here is the explanation https://tinyurl.com/y7f4j7dz

[smudwhisk]

I can't see how Northumberland are going to benefit financially from the tie up with Familysearch unless they are developing a website to sell subscriptions that will allow access to the images hosted on Familysearch.  Familysearch don't charge access to view images at their FHC, granted I've not tried to access any of those for Northumberland, but I can't see them doing that anyway.  I suspect that perhaps that's what is due to happen but how successful it will be remains to be seen. 

As can be seen from the number of lookup requests on RC, some people won't subscribe to SEAX because of the separate subscription costs and/or the fact that they have to browse the registers and not just search and view.  While I don't doubt that the commercial companies are paying the lowest royalties they feel they can get away with, I do think Suffolk RO may be deluding themselves as to how much income they could generate from their records at a particular cost level.  Higher royalties for one RO from a commercial company would no doubt become public however commercially sensitive and other ROs would want to negotiate theirs upwards, leading to higher subscription costs and less subscribers.  Many people begrudge paying subs now so this could well reduce income for the commercial companies and ROs. 

While I can understand that Suffolk feel they should maximise what they can get for access to their records, I do feel they are deluding themselves as to how much people may be prepared to pay for access and this can in my mind be seen for the charges for the copy Wills and Marriage Licences through their own website.  If they think they can charge a high price for single parish register copy images, where people find what they wish to view from a Familysearch index and order a copy, I think they may be very disappointed.  If they don't offer subscription options in one form or another, as they haven't done with the Wills and Marriage Licences, they are very unlikely to generate anywhere near the income they think they can.  As we all know from experience, indexes are subject to errors in interpretation and omissions and its far better to be able to view the records yourself rather than relying on an index.   Suffolk RO to my mind needs to get a dose of reality on the whole subject as soon as possible.

[Trevor Rix]

As the Northumberland project has been mentioned by two Suffolk county councillors in charge of the Suffolk Record Offices, there must be some sort of income stream or such a project for Suffolk would not be under consideration.

Essex SEAX is wonderful even without parish register indexes. The digitised wills are well catalogued. I happily pay £85/year subscription for 24/7 access from wherever I happen to be. Although I live in Suffolk relatively close to Chelmsford, the costs in my time, travel, car parking etc. make visiting the record office for free access unaffordable. The SEAX project was completed with the help of a lottery grant organised by the county archivist who had previously obtained a lottery grant to digitise many Kent parish registers for the Medway area which are available free of charge on the new version of CityArk at http://medway.adlibhosting.com

If Kent and Essex can do it with lottery grants, why can't Suffolk?

I agree that the current Suffolk pay per view/download at £6 a time is not going to work. It is naive for Suffolk to expect a viable income stream using this method. As far as I know only Scotlands People have made a success of pay per view, because they have digitised huge collections of records, and their prices are way less than £6.

Findmypast were initially pay per view only, but it did not take them long to realise that subscriptions were the way to go.

[smudwhisk]

It would be interesting to know how Northumberland will generate an income stream if Familysearch are hosting their parish registers, it could well be some web front end access from the RO website to Familysearch whereby individuals subscribe to the RO and that's where the income is from.  Mind you at the FHC I visit we do often have issues loading images from FS, which might be down to the local connection rather than FS itself, but if charges started to apply and problems with access occurred, people would start complaining (as they do now with Ancestry and FindMyPast).

I know that the FHC I visit did charge previously 10p per print off from the web, but this had to stop some years back because HMRC wanted them to be VAT registered and it wasn't in their interests to do it for such a minimal amount.  While I accept that FS host their data in the US, I would have thought that if they started charging anything themselves in order to provide royalties to ROs in this country, then the US Tax authorities could take an interest.  It seems more likely that perhaps they may host them for an RO over here who provides the subscription facilities linking to the images on FS, but who knows.

As you say I wonder why Suffolk don't explore heritage lottery grants as a way of getting their PRs online.  To my mind they are more interested in the new Records Office being built, yet you would have thought that if they'd got the PRs online before this, it would have generated an income stream for them even if it wasn't as much as they hoped.  I agree SEAX is a great facility, I've used it in the past, although even there I've found issues with the quality of a few of the scans being rather low resolution and difficult to read.  Some were rescanned but others I was informed were not an issue.   This may have since been resolved as I've not subscribed for a few years as have been working on other areas.

[jonwicken]

Thanks so much for this update. Looks like this is going to take a good while yet, which is so unfortunate.

Jon

[coombs]

Yes, we must be prepared for a long wait. FreeREG has some parish coverage for Suffolk but it is very hit and miss. Although Tannington and Little Glemham have a few 1770s PR's transcribed recently.

Essex is getting easier and easier now thanks to FreeREG. I am sure several of my Suffolk brickwalls would be helped along when we eventually get their records online.

[Trevor Rix]

Here is some news regarding the Northumberland parish register digitisation at FamilySearch that Suffolk were watching. As has been pointed out, where is the income stream for the county council/record office?

http://anglo-celtic-connections.blogspot.com/2018/07/northumberland-parish-registers-at.html
https://tinyurl.com/y9xxsplw

My information is that Suffolk may have moved on from that idea now.