An article by Jim Gilchrist at Scotsman.com News highlights Scotland’s Family History Centre, a £1.6million effort to link the General Register House and New Register House. When it’s finished, there will be a “one-stop single point of archive access to more than 40 million digitised records.
Th is s a long article, but it’s well worth reading, if your of Scottish descent, doing genealogy work for somebody of Scottish descent, or you just like reading about these kinds of things. Excerpted from the article:
“We’re passionate about genealogy,” declares Macniven, “and we’ve got this absolutely unparalleled collection of material here. We’ve had the Scottish Family History Centre project going for three years and we’re now seeing the fruits of it in website form, while work has now started on the building side.”
He’s referring to the partnership, initiated in 2002, between the National Archives of Scotland – one of the most extensive archive collections in Britain – the General Register Office for Scotland (in New Register House) and the Court of the Lord Lyon.
“We’ve digitised far more than other nations,” he adds. “They’ll catch up, but we’ve been in the vanguard.”
Scotland has been doing a lot more than other nations *ahem* USA and Canada *ahem* in this area, although in all fairness, there are many people at the US Library of Congress and National Archives that are working hard to make material available. Problems arise when it comes to funding. In Canada, it’s slightly different. There have been several struggles over privacy vs access (involving census records among other things).