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Re: Failure to Credit Fees



Boy, don't I wish!  I wish we could charge people who don't credit
us, or are rude on the phone, or demand that we drop everything
and do all their research...

But here's a cautionary tale along these same lines.  Here at the
University of Utah, we're coming up on our sesquicentennial
celebrations on Feb. 28, 2000.  So in honor of that, myself and a
couple of other folks in the library have been putting together a
website about the history of the University; lots of neat photos of
the campus, the sports teams, the library, and on and on; if I can
scale the file down, I plan to have a .wav sound file of Jerry Rubin
ranting in the Union Ballroom in 1970 about how the Yippies are
coming to Salt Lake City to straighten out the Mormons!  (aside:
when I asked one of my part-timers to make the file and said it was
Jerry Rubin of the Chicago Seven, she looked at me blankly, and
then said brightly "Oh yeah, I read about that in a history book. "
Sigh!)

So anyway, the University PR department gets wind of this, and
asks me to make a CD of high-resolution scans that they can put
in the press kit they are giving out for the local media.  I demurred,
saying we had policies in place to protect ourselves and our
collections, and that while I would be happy to give them a CD of
low-rez scans that they could give away, we had a long-standing,
and hard-fought policy of not giving out high-rez scans without
properly signed Permission to Publish and Contract Governing Use
of Photographs forms.  Which, of course, would not be the case if
we just gave them away willy-nilly.

Well!  I thought that was that, silly me.  So last week I'm in a staff
meeting and here comes the library director, all agitated, and
points a finger at me and says "I need to talk to you!"  Of course, I
immediately flashed on those days when the PA would come on
and say "Roy Webb: Report to the Principals Office Immediately!!"
It turns out, to shorten this sad story, that the head of University
PR had called up the VP for University Communications, who
called the library director, who pointed the finger of fate at me.  I
told her my objections; that we derive a comfortable income from
those images, which we could expect to lose, and more
importantly we lose all legal control of the images if we give them
away like that.  There was nothing to stop the media from selling
them or re-using them, or even worse, if one of the images is used
in a manner so as to offend an alumni, that alum. could then turn
around and sue the University.  Under the conditions the library has
established, i.e. if they sign our forms, we are as protected from
that as anyone can be, since our form includes an indemnification
clause.  This way we have no protection.  She called the VP back,
he said do it anyway, she told me do it anyway.  In the complete
and utter absence of any word to the contrary, I made a CD of low-
rez scans; then got a call from the PR head, who said that was not
acceptable, and as much as threatened me with my job if I didn't
do exactly what she said.  So I did, after documenting the whole
incident in a memo to the library director, and under strenuous
protest.  In effect, the PR department hijacked our project to do a
warm fuzzy for the local press.

So the moral of this little tale?  A good deed never goes
unpunished.


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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