Licensing

Licensing at The National Archives

As the custodians of the most comprehensive range of UK family history records anywhere in the world, archived alongside collections of great value to academic institutions and historians, we welcome licensing enquiries from all comers.

Family History

Our records include censuses, military, immigration, births, deaths and marriages. Much of the popular collections have already been digitised; however, there remains a huge amount of fascinating material, sometimes remaining untouched for many years, occasionally even since their original creation.

Academic

Covering a broad chronological span of nearly 1,000 years and with records of global relevance, academic digital publishers have long sought to base their primary source publications on our archival material. The range of publishing possibilities is huge, and encompasses economic, social, political, scientific, military and colonial themes.

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Become a licensing partner

We welcome new partners to increase dissemination of and access to government records. Although there are no specific requirements to becoming a National Archives Licensing Partner, typically you will be able to demonstrate the following:

• Experience of managing large-scale digitisation projects of heritage material
• Experience of online publication of heritage material, particularly in Academic or Family History markets
• Viable commercial models that return an income stream to licensors

Licence exceptions

We will grant appropriate licences wherever possible. However please note that we may refuse a licence in certain circumstances, including the following:

• If your request to reproduce The National Archives’ material falls outside our standard non-exclusive licensing terms and conditions. If we reject your application we will explain why, try to offer another solution, and work with you to revise your application.
• If certain content is protected by the intellectual property rights of a third party and that party has not given you their permission.
• If you have previously copied Crown copyright material without permission and this matter remains unresolved; or do not have enough creditworthiness (according to our checks with credit reference agencies) to pay any licence fees and are not willing to offer another method of payment (for example, a bank guarantee, payment in advance etc).
• If we consider the use of our material to be inappropriate. For example: where the intended use of The National Archives’ material is likely to bring The National Archives into disrepute; or is deemed to infringe acceptable standards of taste and decency; or is not in keeping with (or misrepresents) the integrity of the original material.
• If you have acquired The National Archives’ material through an illegitimate source. For example, pirate copies that infringe our or third party copyright.
• If you intend to reproduce material that concerns public security, defence, state security (including national economic well-being), confidential information, legal proceedings.

Opportunities and proposals

We invite proposals for the commercial digitisation of records and packages through our licensing programmes. To aid and support partners in the discovery of our records, our team has researched opportunities for partners to consider. These opportunities are not designed to be prescriptive, rather an invitation to you use the records as illustrated, or as the foundations for bigger ideas.

The following opportunities have been selected against a range of criteria, including their value for use as primary research material. We provide an overview of the documents available. Our opportunities offer descriptions of subject matter, indexable information, size, scope and condition of the collections, including photographs of the documents.

The History of Space Science

Licensing tenders

Periodically we release tender opportunities to licence, digitise, transcribe and publish National Archives records.

Successful bidders will be awarded a non-exclusive commercial license to digitise the records, transcribe all data and publish those records online for commercial exploitation, in return for royalties paid to the licensor. The winning bidder will be required to cover all costs incurred in bringing the project online.

Please note that if more than one tender application is received within one month of the first, that tender may become competitive. All applications will be assessed within one month of receipt.

Digitised collections

The National Archives began digitising government records in the early 21st century, with the 1861-1891 censuses. Today, more than 80 million images have been digitised and many are available for image purchase and licensing.

These digitised collections tend to focus on genealogy; however, increasingly many are also available for academic publishing.

Over 80,000 images from our collection are available to license and download via our Image Library.

For a list of Family History record sets available for sale and licensing, please email associates@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Complaints

If you wish to complain about any aspect of the handling of your application for a licence, please contact associates@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

If you are still dissatisfied, our Complaints procedure gives further information about complaints under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015.