I may well have misremembered, but I thought the GRO, or their masters, had made a positive decision *not* to allow the use of the latest indexes by commercial companies. Having given up on their own digitisation projects, reversing this decision would seem to make perfect financial sense. Given the state of Government finances, I can't believe that the decision to maintain the original position would have been made by 'bean-counters' but is more likely to be an ill-judged attempt to restrict access to the indexes in pursuit of supposed 'data protection' and 'privacy' objectives. John Brown Leic., Eng ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Powys-Lybbe" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 11:43 PM Subject: Re: [SOG-UK] Changes to GRO fiche index locations - Newcastlereplaces LMA > On 21 Oct at 21:39, J K gen <[email protected]> wrote: > >> As I understand it the fiche production is a requirement for the >> newest events, none of which form part of an online database. Whether >> it should be is another question. > > And this other question is one that we should address. > > I am sure that at Middleton Street we were able to access the post 1984 > indices on a computer, effectively on-line. This made for fast and > effective searches and certainly the online database for 1984 to 2005/6 > is very effective. > > The last time I registered anything, I believe it had to be done at a > computer terminal and the data was held on a database and only printed > if required. The master copy is no longer on paper. > > Assuming that registrations are still computer entered (by the > registrars), the data for recent events, 2006 to 2011, must be on some > database. It does not make any sense to then go for physical copies to > fiche. > > What maggot is in the brain of the government bean-counters that forbids > them to allow us online access to data that is already on line? Is this > not something that all the genealogical societies should get together on > and have a big campaign on? > > I know that the project to computerise and deliver all registered data > has run out of money and stalled, but there cannot be major expense > required to provide access to the recent registrations. I can believe > that many commercial outfits would be delighted to provide an on-line > system to give index information for the price of adding a few adverts. > It might even be that the FreeBMD gurus would do a better job for almost > nothing. > > Or have I sadly misunderstood something? > > -- > Tim Powys-Lybbe