Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Mocavo Announces Free Scanning Service

Mocavo sent this announcement out today - this sounds very useful for those with lots of family papers and photos to scan. See my concern at the end of this post.

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It always seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day or enough days in the week, doesn’t it?  Take a look around you.  Do you have piles of research laying around?  Old books gathering dust? Historical documents sitting in boxes?

From now until the end of the year we will scan your documents, send you a digital copy, and put them online at Mocavo -- for FREE!

We work with our community to bring all of the world’s genealogical information online for free putting everyone’s family history within reach.  We are bringing lots and lots of historical information and databases to Mocavo; but, don’t let us have all the fun.  Join in!

The most important piece of your genealogy puzzle might be lying in someone else’s attic or basement.  In fact, your dusty pile of documents could hold the clue to solve another genealogist’s riddle.  Let us knock the dust off and help you tell your story to the world.

Learn more about Mocavo’s Free Scanning Service at www.mocavo.com/freescanning


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The one concern I have is about copyright. People using this service should not have materials under copyright protection copied by Mocavo and put online at Mocavo. In general, if you did not produce the material after 1923, you should not have it scanned.

The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/11/mocavo-announces-free-scanning-service.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Randy,

Thanks for your review. I wanted to address the concern that you raise about copyrights. We try to make clear on the mocavo.com/freescanning web page that copyright protected materials should not be submitted. To clarify further, once we receive materials from our community members we will review them to determine their copyright status. If copyright protection is in place, the material will not be included on our site. You can find additional information about our copyright policies in our Terms of Service.

Kind regards,

Ryan Hunter
Chief Operating Officer
Mocavo, Inc.

Laura Cosgrove Lorenzana said...

Thank you so much for posting this.

May I address another concern? I looked at both Mocavo and ReadyMicro's websites (I'm a Mocavo subscriber) and I am NOT convinced that it would be advisable to send your one-of-a-kind family material to them to be digitized. While it seems like this project would be fabulous for the reams and reams of contemporary paper we copy our research to, or duplicate photos we have, as an Archivist I would advise against sending anything else. Why? As someone who handles material of historical value every day, and a Consulting Archivist who worked on a large digitization project for a client, I know the disaster that can be caused by providing the material to a vendor who's specialty is high speed scanning not the scanning of historical material. And, while they make an off-handed comment about 'delicate material' on the website, would you want to risk an irreplaceable item in the hands of someone trained to do nothing more than use a piece of equipment?

Unfortunately, I've seen it happen with a client. I would hate to see it happen to anyone else.