Helping Library Patrons Tell Their Family Stories

The MyHeritage Library Edition database provides libraries and their users access to billions of genealogy records—including census data, vital records, and immigration and military documents—from around the world. The platform is multilingual, works seamlessly on mobile devices, and offers both basic and advanced search options, making it a powerful, user-friendly resource for genealogists, educators, researchers, and anyone else interested in preserving and exploring heritage.

Product Overview

MyHeritage Library Edition makes it easy to dig into family history and trace ancestors. In addition, libraries, archives, and museums could use material from the database to highlight local or cultural history by curating exhibits, showcasing oral histories, photographs, and community collections, or bringing forward underrepresented stories using immigration records, Indigenous records, or women’s suffrage materials.

EBSCO’s platform is generally intuitive and easy to navigate. The clean layout and key functions—including search filters, results lists, and viewing options—are clearly labeled and consistent across pages, which helps users locate and explore materials efficiently. Headings, links, and form fields are typically well-structured, allowing users who rely on keyboard navigation or assistive software to move through search results and record details with minimal difficulty. Users can enlarge text and zoom in on images without losing functionality or clarity. This feature is especially valuable for low-vision users and those working with detailed historical records or faded handwriting.

Other accessibility features, however, could use updating. Some scanned images, older PDFs, and improperly formatted files are hard to read. Some scans lack alt text, headings, or readable optical character recognition (OCR) layers, making them difficult for screen-reader users to navigate. Enhancing the quality of OCR and adding tagging would greatly improve the accessibility of these materials for users with visual impairments.

In addition to including records from around the world, the platform supports multiple languages and scripts, which both makes it more inclusive and helps users conduct cross-cultural or genealogical research.

User Experience

The MyHeritage Library Edition landing page has a clean interface featuring a simple search box and an “Advanced Search” option (Figure 1). In addition to searching, users can browse by record type, including census data, immigration records, birth and marriage records, newspapers, and directories. Features like “Recently added records,” popular searches, tutorials, and “Getting Started” links provide helpful guidance for new users.

Once a search is entered—say, “John Doe, Pennsylvania, 1880”—the system generates a list of matching results that may include census, death, marriage, or passenger records. Users can use filters to refine results by record type, date, location, or source collection. Selecting a record opens a detailed view that includes metadata, such as record type, date, and location, along with related names and sources.

Many records include images of original documents that the user can zoom in on, save, or download, and some also provide links to related records, such as other census years or household listings (Figure 2).

Users can save materials to a project space, where bookmarks and recent searches are also stored for future reference. The project space includes dashboards that suggest related records and house tools for citation export, sharing, or integration with family tree software. Advanced features, like multilingual translation and text-to-speech, further enhance accessibility.

Over time, users can build collections of relevant items alongside saved projects and their search history, which allows them to continue their research seamlessly.

While the experience is smooth and mobile friendly, occasional challenges include incomplete scans, inconsistent metadata, and the need for manual filtering when name variants return large result sets. Serious researchers may need to double-check details or turn to other sources for hard-to-find material.

Contracting and Pricing Provisions:

Institutional pricing for MyHeritage Library Edition varies. Small libraries report paying a few hundred dollars per year through a consortium or using a limited-access plan. Medium-sized public libraries and academic libraries typically pay from $5,000–$30,000 per year, based on publicly available library budgets.

EBSCO determines pricing based on:

• Library size

• Remote access in addition to in-library use

• Individual library vs consortium purchase

• Negotiated discounts or multi-year contract terms

The contract allows limited academic use, such as sharing small excerpts for course packs or e-reserves, and supports unlimited simultaneous access for authorized users. MARC records and metadata enable integration with library catalogs and discovery systems. Relevance is based on library indexing practices rather than algorithmic reasoning, and all usage data remains private under EBSCO’s policies.

Authentication Models

Access is managed via IP, proxy, or single sign-on. The platform is fully browser based with no downloads or plug-ins required.

Competitive or Related Products

Ancestry Library Edition, the library version of Ancestry.com, is one of the best-known genealogy databases. It contains billions of records, including US censuses, vital records, immigration and military data, and international collections. Some features from the consumer Ancestry.com site (like personal family trees and DNA tools) are not available in the library version.

Both Ancestry Library Edition and MyHeritage Library Edition offer huge collections of global records and similar search tools. MyHeritage places a stronger emphasis on international and multilingual records, while Ancestry has a particularly deep collection of US data.

FindMyPast is another big name in genealogy, with a strong focus on the UK, Ireland, and former British Empire. It is built for libraries and allows users to explore historical records for family research. By comparison, MyHeritage covers more countries worldwide.

Critical Evaluation

MyHeritage Library Edition provides an intuitive interface and a vast collection of records that make family history research both accessible and rewarding. It is an especially valuable tool for the general public, undergraduates, and community college students just getting started with genealogy or social history research. Remote access, multilingual support, and frequent content updates deepen its accessibility and relevance, although its screen-reader navigation could be improved.

One of its standout features is its global scope. The database provides access to records from dozens of countries, which is especially helpful for patrons tracing family connections across borders. But coverage is uneven. US and European materials are comprehensive, while the records for other regions appear more limited.

The search engine is generally easy to use but relies on traditional metadata and keyword-based retrieval with Boolean operators and filters. While this produces consistent results, it lacks modern enhancements like semantic linking, AI-driven search, or visual browsing, which limits flexibility for advanced researchers.

Recommendation

Overall, MyHeritage Library Edition is a high-quality resource for academic and public libraries prioritizing cultural preservation, archival access, and humanities research, particularly North American and European heritage studies.

References

LJ Reviews. (2016, February 15). Migration to New Worlds; MyHeritage Library Edition | Reference eReviews. Library Journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/migration-to-new-worlds-myheritage-library-edition-reference-ereviews-february-15-2016

EBSCO. (n.d.). MyHeritage Library Edition. EBSCO Information Services. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.ebsco.com/products/myheritage-library-edition

EBSCO. (2023, August 15). Connecting generations: One patron’s remarkable journey with MyHeritage Library Edition. EBSCOpost. https://about.ebsco.com/blogs/ebscopost/2558428/connecting-generations-one-patrons-remarkable-journey-myheritage-library