The article by Jean Dryden, entitled “Copyright issues in the selection of archival material for internet access” was published in Archival Science last June (here is a link, although the article will only be accessible if you have a subscription). Through policy review, questionnaires and interviews with 106 institutions, the author evaluates how restrictive an archives’ digitization selection is due to copyright concerns.

The author finds that overall the archives are more restrictive than necessary, by and large excluding the digitization of material that contains purely factual information (i.e. public records) and should not be subject to copyright. Additionally two-thirds of the archives do not digitize any material that involves third-party rights holders, instead focusing on public domain works or those they own the copyright to.

Of the third that do digitize materials with third-party rights holders, most make some attempt to seek permission. When such permission can’t be obtained, a “risk management” approach is often employed wherein the material is published with a notice that it will be taken down should a legitimate claim arise. Of the 106 repositories surveyed, only 8 had received a request to remove material, and of those only 4 were substantiated.

Naturally, the particulars in the article apply specifically to Canadian copyright law, but there are similarities enough between the Canadian and American laws to gain something from the study, such as questions of how much time is actually spent on securing permissions and the effectiveness of these activities (see also, Maggie Dickson’s presentation from the Southern Historical Collection Symposia earlier this year). It’s also not surprising that the majority of the archives studied would take a restrictive approach, but I was glad to see the idea of “risk management” being discussed as a viable option.

As many of us discussed at the symposium last March at UNC-CH, a timid approach to these questions is going to become really impossible if we are interested in “large-scale” digitization. In fact, the article closes with an invitation to do more research on how copyright decisions can be reasonably handled when dealing with larger scale projects.