Virtually all the large commercial genealogy data companies have been using "off-shore" agencies for indexing for many years now. Even the British Government sent out one of their census "years" for indexing in (I believe) India. It was such a disaster they had to withdraw it shortly after it's initial release. You really cannot blame these companies. They are not forcing anyone in the, so called, 3rd World to carry out this work. Far from it, there are locally owned agencies in these countries actively marketing cut-price transcription, indexing, and data translation services at rates which are a fraction of what it would cost to do in the (?) 1st World. From everything I've seen the people doing the work are only too happy to be employed and they are being at least fairly (if not well) paid for their efforts - by their local standards. In an ideal World this would be an perfect match of supply and demand. Unfortunately this is NOT an ideal World and the lack of an "appropriate mother tongue" background has turned out to be major problem in terms of the fidelity of the transcription and indexing work. Well, to be more precise it should have turned out to be a major problem but to (I'm sure) the surprise of the companies who published these highly inaccurate indexes, they were wildly successful and while there were many complaints their customers kept on paying the fees to access them, and it is in it's financial balance sheet that a company judges it's success and failure. In this case (as I understand it) the owners of the Drouin collection actually set standards for the transcription and it is the failure to meet these standards which is at the route of the legal action, again, not a refusal by the genealogical public to support such a flawed service. I find it interesting that the only other case I know of where a flawed transcription was withdrawn was the one published by the British Government. That is an organization which judged its success or failure by the complaints of the users and not by the bottom line of the balance sheet. I suggest that those of you who wish to express dissatisfaction with the way in which some companies provide genealogical services do so by not supporting them. Otherwise you will continue to receive the cheapest possible service simply because it makes the genealogical data service provider the best profit. Malcolm Archive CD Books Canada Inc. President: Malcolm Moody PO Box 11 Manotick Ontario, K4M 1A2 Canada. (613) 692-2667 WEB SITE: http://www.ArchiveCDBooks.ca On 30 Aug, 2009, at 1:30 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Message: 4 > Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:20:16 -0400 > From: "Colleen Andrews" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [CAN-ONT-SIMCOE] Drouin Collection & Ancestry problems > To: <[email protected]> > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; > reply-type=original > > Oh my God...do they do that with all their indexing? It would > explain a > lot...that's one of the worst examples of exploitive 3rd world > labour I've > ever heard of. Shame on them. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Sharlene Bell-Haussmann" <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2009 11:49 AM > Subject: Re: [CAN-ONT-SIMCOE] Drouin Collection & Ancestry problems > > > Ancestry farmed the Drouin out to the Chinese to index......With their > unique way of talking English, no wonder the index is flawed....... > > Shar