Introduction

This chapter discusses the economic impact which the move towards commercial family history websites has had on archival institutions. It describes how the ability to license copies of archive records and to make them available online has spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry. The major family history companies provide online access to billions of records and have transformed family history research and academic investigation of biographical material. This new industry has leveraged millions of dollars of investment into digital archival resources and has generated some income for archives, but arguably not nearly enough. As we will discover, it has had some downside for the sociability of the family history community.

Since 2002, archives have largely contracted out their online public service offerings to family history companies. In most cases it is possible to access the records in archive buildings (in a variety of formats), but for those wishing to access them without travelling long distances, or who want access to the indexes which the family history companies provide, then there is little alternative but to sign up to Ancestry, Findmypast, MyHeritage or other suppliers and buy services from them.

Very little has been published on the economics of archives, except to bemoan the collapse in user numbers without asking why or considering if the current business model is any longer sustainable. Most of the literature focuses on the cognate, but different, fields of museums and libraries. One pioneering work undertaken in the USA by Yakel et al. (2012) looked at a range of ways of measuring the economic impact of archives. These included contingent measures which attempt to discover how much a user would be willing to pay to use an existing service or how much a user would have to pay to buy that service on the market. Yakel and colleagues also discussed direct measures which looked at the financial impact of cultural services – how much money in terms of staff salaries, construction expenditure, revenues from sales taxes etc. went to the local economy from cultural institutions.

However, the approach favoured by Yakel et al. was to focus on the indirect economic benefits of archives, calculating how much users spent during their visits. Their conclusions were that the economic benefits of archives were real, but modest.