My work this week has been all about reading. Reading articles and reports, reading about copyright, reading how other institutions have implemented their digitization programs. I did take some time out from my reading to meet with the chief curator at AAM and discuss the issue of copyright in relation to the Brundage archive.
My questions about who holds the copyrights for the archive were met with a resounding “we just don’t know”, which is an expected answer. Based upon my reading it is pretty common not to be sure of who holds the copyright for archival holdings. Some repositories have spent large amounts of time and money to track down the copyright holders and obtain permissions from them. All of their searching resulted in a very small return on definitively determining the rights. They have solved this by just publishing the items to their website and in the unlikely result that someone complains they just remove the item.
This is the option that I suggested to the curator and he seemed agreeable. After all, publishing portions of the archive on the web is very unlikely to interfere with anyone’s livelihood.
As for this weeks question on the leadership style of the site supervisor: it is difficult to tell. He is the only librarian. I cannot see how he relates to subordinates. My overall impression is that he has a laid back style. He makes modest changes but does not aggressively pursue them.
Your recommendation as to posting and then taking down if requested is the approach taken by many archives. It's the approach taken by the Internet Archives as well. Here's a quote from their copyright page:
ReplyDeleteWhile we collect publicly available Internet documents, sometimes authors and publishers express a desire for their documents not to be included in the Collections (by tagging a file for robot exclusion or by contacting us or the original crawler group). If the author or publisher of some part of the Archive does not want his or her work in our Collections, then we may remove that portion of the Collections without notice.
Copyright sure opens a can of worms (from what I've seen). While I think we can all appreciate and understand the need for this protection is it sometimes just to complicated? I wonder if the copyright lawyers have given any thought to establishing something similar to a big bucket approach?
ReplyDelete