Kalpana Shankar (University College Dublin): Public-Private Partnerships and the Case of Geneaology: Threats to Open Data?

The expansion of digital genealogical research tools has sparked immense growth in this field. A report commissioned by Europeana found that interest in genealogy research doubled between 2008 – 2013 and now online genealogy research is a three billion (US) dollar business. This increased demand has led to a race for market share in the provision of digital genealogical data. This demand presents an opportunity for libraries and archives, but it also poses a threat to open data by privatizing public data. In this talk, I will discuss the role of public-private partnerships (PPP) among libraries, archives, and commercial geneaology companies, with wide implications for organizational sustainability, access to data, and the open data movement.