Well, it's happened again. At the end of March I announced that Ancestry had been forced to remove a database of Isle of Man civil registration indexes which it had crawled from another user's wesbite and added to their platform without any given consent, a move which was labelled as "apparent data theft" by the data creator (see http://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2024/03/ancestry-pulls-isle-of-man-civil.html).
Now Ancestry has removed its Aberdeen and North-East Scotland, Index to Memorial Inscription Booklets, 1500-2021 database (see http://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2024/03/ancestry-adds-aberdeenshire-memorial.html), appropriated from content created by the Aberdeen and North-East Scotland Family History Society, again without any given consent.
It seems that Ancestry is adding these collections to its site as part of an initiative called Ancestry Web Records. On its guide at https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Finding-Records-Online-with-Ancestry-Web-Records it notes the following:
Libraries, governments, genealogical societies, universities, and genealogists have made a wealth of information available online. Ancestry® web records makes it easy to find records from many of these places. We summarize information from free web records and provide links to the original sites.
Guiding principles of web records
- Access to web records is free. No one needs to subscribe or register with Ancestry to view these records.
- Web records are attributed to the content publishers.
- They're easily available. Prominent links make it easy to access the source website.
The site also adds the following for content creators:
We follow web standards for restricting crawling (robots.txt files). If a website has a robots.txt file that prohibits crawling the genealogical records, we don't search those records. If records from your website are included and you'd like them removed, please send a request to websearch@ancestry.com.
In essence, Ancestry is sweeping the web for data that it can add to its site. It's not charging for such data, and it is linking back to the original content creators, but one has to ask whether this is being done for charitable reasons, or for other purposes. There can be many positive reasons for hosting such material - and indeed, in the past, Ancestry has created third party indexes to records available on other platforms, with their agreement, which you can often see with Web: written as a prefix to the collection title. But to just arbitrarily take content that others have created without seeking permission first does seem to me to be something that may potentially break trust with many people and organisations, and potentially earn itself a few Darwin Awards along the way.
Records from the Isle of Man and Aberdeenshire collected on such a basis have already been removed over the last month as soon as the collection creators have learned about their appropriation. What else has been appropriated in the same way? Maybe Ancestry should think again about such a practice?
Chris
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