Thread by @garius

This is outrageous and basically fucks any amateur historian trying to do stuff like, say, WW1 survivor research that isn't about one particular person in their family.

https://twitter.com/TricksterPrince/status/1453360544715530245

I have zero problem with paying a subscription to services that provide access to records and do the legwork of digitising.

I pay for a whole bunch - from ancestor searches, to war record stuff, to newspaper archives.

I pay that, for 12 months every year, when in reality I'm not doing searches every single day. And I don't MIND that, because implicit in it is an expectation that what my money is going towards is FUTURE digitisation.

You don't get to charge me twice for that.

Our picture of history isn't just expanded by academics (who themselves are going to be screwed by this). It's expanded by people, like me, who put a lot of graft and our own money into finding and telling stories to try and connect, or reconnect people with our past.

90% of my history threads are based on fishing expeditions - finding that one snippet in a book, or archive, then having to investigate around it on sites like @findmypast.

By pricing the 1921 census as extra PER RECORD, they fuck me and others who do that.

It's unfair, and it's exploitative. Either have a subscription model, or have a pay model. You don't get to dip into both income streams.

A model like this makes it very much about finding ONE PERSON's past. It's an admission that their tools are selfish, not about society.

I mean this is LITERALLY a testimony on @findmypast's 1921 census page to try and increase hype.

Good fucking luck Kathryn. Hope you've got deep pockets for all those individual records you're about to be charged for, on top of your regular subscription.

#noFishingAllowed

And let's not let National Archives off the hook for this either. They'll have known full well this is what was planned. They're literally getting royalties out of it.

Open access to our history my arse.