New fees for digitising files from the National Archives of Australia

I have been waiting several months now, for the National Archives of Australia (NAA) to open a particular file of interest to me. I finally received an email to advise me that the file now has a status of 'open.' This meant, that I could finally apply for a copy of the file.

I followed the indicated process to order a digitised copy of the file (it appears you can no longer obtain a hard copy of a file) and got to the section where the fee for the digitisation service was shown. To put it mildly, I was shocked.

I then viewed a copy of the NAA Fact Sheet number 51, titled 'copying charges.' Increased charges for file digitisation, applied since 24 October 2016.

A small file (typically up to 10 pages) costs $27.90.

A standard file (typically 11-100 pages) costs $75.90.

A large file (typically 101-400 pages) costs $235.40.

Now, any reader of this blog who has used RecordSearch on the NAA website, and looked for files on UFOs, will know that they are typically over 100 pages long. This means that if you were to request any UFO file today, it would cost you $235.40 per file.  I doubt that many blog readers would ever pay $235.40 for one digitised file.

Fortunately, due to the diligence of a number of South Australian UFO researchers, almost all the known NAA UFO files have already been digitised, at vastly lower fees.