Undue Diligence?

"My purpose today is to suggest to you why I think that archivists have by and large failed to use new digital technologies to make the riches in their holdings more widely accessible. Money, of course, has a lot to do with it. The funding for massive archival digitization projects has just not been available. But there has also been a reluctance on the part of archivists to pursue the small amount of funding that is available because of our professional practices.

The History and Current State of Digital Preservation in the United States

Chapter 7 of 8.The world of information is becoming ever more digital. While advances in information technology have undeniable advantages, they also pose significant threats to the long-term accessibility of information. Digital information is not durable. The goal of digital preservation is to maintain the ability to display, retrieve, and use digital collections in the face of rapidly changing technological and organizational infrastructures and elements. For over a decade now, a small group of librarians, archivists, publishers, and technologists have been trying to address how best to ensure that the digital information of today is still accessible to the future. This paper will survey some of the efforts that are underway in North America to understand how best to preserve digital information. Major investigations into the issues of digital preservation are currently underway at the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, in a number of university-based research projects, at the national bibliographic utilities, and at some technical laboratories. A number of different technical solutions are being explored, and it is likely that the best digital preservation solutions will use a combination of technical approaches. Studies have revealed that the biggest impediments to digital preservation are not primarily technical. Even more important are issues of ownership, economics, and organization.Cornell University Librar

Copyright Keeps Open Archives and Digital Preservation Separate

Explores whether publication with a "green" open access publisher will guarantee the preservation of an article

Research, Libraries, and Fair Use: The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1935

The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1935 was a voluntary agreement that set guidelines for the limits of acceptable reproduction of copyrighted materials on behalf of scholars. Developed in response to the challenge posed by the easy and inexpensive photographic reproduction of research materials, the Agreement allowed library, archives, museum, or similar institutions to make single photographic copies of a part of a copyrighted work in lieu of loaning the physical item. The copies were not supposed to substitute for the purchase of the original work, and they were intended solely to facilitate research. Liability for misuse was to rest with the individual requesting the copy, and not with the institution making the reproduction. The Gentlemen's Agreement has long been recognized as one of the most important landmarks in the history of the fair use privilege. In addition, the model of consensual voluntary guidelines agreed to by copyright owners and users, first used with the Gentlemen's Agreement, has become an important technique in clarifying the limits of fair use. Yet little attention has been paid to its genesis or intended audience. Most commentators view the agreement as primarily a product of long and thoughtful negotiation with librarians, and hence a reflection of their interests. A closer examination of the history of the creation of the Gentlemen's Agreement, however, reveals both the limitations of the common assumptions about the Gentlemen's Agreement and also the limitations of mutually-agreed upon guidelines. The individuals involved with the negotiations from both the scholarly and publishing side were far from representative of their respective areas, and had no authority to negotiate on behalf of their respective spheres. The Agreement itself was largely a product of one afternoon's meeting, with limited discussion and review afterwards. Furthermore, the Gentlemen's Agreement was intended to serve the needs of research scholars, not librarians. Through an accident of history, however, it was a librarian who conducted the primary negotiations with publishers. As a result, library interests, and not the interests of the research community, came to dominate. Furthermore, the librarian who led the negotiations was different from most of his colleagues in both his professional dependence on the good will of New York publishers and the limited scope of his own library's involvement with library reproduction. As a result, broader issues, such as the educational use of copyrighted material or the extent of acceptable copying under fair use, were consciously excluded from the discussions. Most of all, the Agreement began the process of subjecting to legal scrutiny private behaviors that up to that point had existed outside of the copyright system. Private actions that had needed no defense in the past came to be viewed as potential infringements of copyright that needed the permission of the copyright owner. Copyright, which up to this time had been a system for controlling publication and widespread commercial distribution of material, began to be seen as a system for controlling private reproduction and use of copyrighted material. Codifying an agreed-upon set of sanctioned behaviors was not without its dangers. In particular, behaviors that were not part of the initial discussions and hence were not officially sanctioned by the Agreement suddenly seemed suspect rather than simply unresolved. The Gentlemen's Agreement thus began to be seen by some as a defacto cap on the extent of acceptable reproduction by librarians and researchers. In the 1976 Copyright Act, the limited vision of acceptable behavior by librarians acting on behalf of researchers became codified in law in Section 108. In very real ways, researchers, librarians, archivists, and museum specialists still live with the consequences of the process that led to the development of the Gentlemen's Agreement

Artifical Intelligence, Expert Systems, and Archival Automation

The success of archival automation during the past two decades cannot be questioned. From the development of the SPINDEX (Selective Permentation Indexing) program at the National Archives, through the work of the National Information Systems Task Force (NISTF) committee, to the development of the MARC AMC (MAchine Readable Cataloging, Archives and Manuscripts Control) format, automation\u27s progress, while perhaps slow in comparison to the library profession, has been sure

Archivists and the TEACH Act

A brief summary of the TEACH Act and its relevance to archives

Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status

D-Lib Magazine 13: 7/8 (July/August 2008) It has long been known that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This article discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some of new steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the public domain. For digital libraries that wish to offer books from this period, they can do so at some risk

Copyright & Your Research

As publishing options increase in number, it is ever more important that university authors manage their copyrights in a way that ensures maximum benefit to them and to the university. Peter Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor in the Cornell University Library and a Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, will give an overview of the sometimes puzzling issues surrounding creating, securing, owning, and using copyrighted works. Topics will include author agreements and contracts, the public access requirements in some federal grants, new publishing options, and the management of your copyrights. The session will benefit those who want to gain a better understanding of the changing nature of scholarly communications. PRESENTATION BY Peter B. Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor, Cornell University Library, and Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet Security and Society, Harvard Universit

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States

Footnote 1: This chart was first published in Peter B. Hirtle, Recent Changes To The Copyright Law: Copyright Term Extension, Archival Outlook, January/February 1999. This version is current as of 1 January 2019. The most recent version is found at https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain. For some explanation on how to use the chart and complications hidden in it, see Peter B. Hirtle, When is 1923 Going to Arrive and Other Complications of the U.S. Public Domain, Searcher (Sept 2012). The chart is based in part on Laura N. Gasaway\u27s chart, When Works Pass Into the Public Domain, at \u3chttp://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm\u3e, and similar charts found in Marie C. Malaro, A Legal Primer On Managing Museum Collections (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998): 155-156. A useful copyright duration chart by Mary Minow, organized by year, is found at http://www.librarylaw.com/DigitizationTable.htm . A flow chart for copyright duration is found at http://sunsteinlaw.com/practices/copyright-portfolio-development/copyright-pointers/copyright-flowchart/ , and a “tree-view” chart on copyright is at http://chart.copyrightdata.com . Several U.S. copyright duration calculators are available online, including the Public Domain Sherpa (http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/calculator.html) and the Durationator (in beta at http://www.durationator.com/). Europeana’s public domain calculators for 30 different countries outside of the U.S. (at http://www.outofcopyright.eu/). The Open Knowledge Foundation has been encouraging the development of public domain calculators for many countries: see http://publicdomain.okfn.org/calculators/. See also Library of Congress Copyright Office. Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright: Provisions of the Law Dealing with the Length of Copyright Protection ( Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress, 2004)http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf. Further information on copyright duration is found in Chapter 3, Duration and Ownership of Copyright, in Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, by Peter B. Hirtle, Emily Hudson, and Andrew T. Kenyon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009) available for purchase at http://bookstore.library.cornell.edu/ and as a free download at http://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/14142. Additional guidance on the public domain may be found in Melissa Levine, Richard C. Adler,and Justin Bonfiglio. Finding the Public Domain: Copyright Review Management System Toolkit (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan Publishing, 13 June 2016) http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/crmstoolkit.14616082.0001.001 and Menesha A. Mannapperuma, Brianna L. Schofield, and Andrea K. Yankovsky, et. al. Is it in the Public Domain? (Berkeley, CA: Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, 27 May 2014) https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/FINAL_PublicDomain_Handbook_FINAL(1).pdf

Questions and Answers

"I was curious about websites because we’re now beginning to accumulate websites and we were thinking about using a website service so it makes it very simple just to find it, click it, ship it and we have archival access to it. But the problem of course is these websites are so complicated and you don’t actually know what you’re fully accessing because there are lots of links; there are lots of portions that may go unexamined. Have you had any experiences with websites that are essentially transnational, that are essentially built in this country but linked to things that are governed by laws outside of U.S. control?