Mr. Brad Argent:

We digitise and index more historical records than anyone else in the world. This is what we do for a living. This is what our friends at findmypast.ie do for a living. Let us do that and let the libraries, archives and other institutions focus on their core competencies. Give them the power to enter into these types of agreements. Empower them to do something about the future. One of the challenges that archives and libraries face around the world is simply the act of conservation and preservation of these wonderful archives. By digitising them, they will be allowed to undertake the core aspects of their work, and I think they need to be given as much scope as possible to do that.

They also need to be able to make decisions for themselves and their own institutions about free content versus paid content. To put this into perspective, the National Archives in the UK gets 25% of its funding from commercial relationships. That equates to about 80 staff. If the organisation decided that it wanted to make all that information free, there would be 80 fewer people employed and therefore there would be a huge amount of people that would not be serviced. While we are focusing on digitisation of records, we all know the reality is that the vast bulk of material will never make it online. It will sit offline and that is the role of our archives and libraries, which preserve and share that with people. We need to make sure that they are funded to do so. The commercialisation of it, putting it behind a paywall, is one way of doing that. The challenge for us all is how to achieve both of those objectives; making it free and making it commercial. I do not believe they are mutually exclusive.