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Re: policy for complaints?



We've never gotten that many complaints along this line, to tell the
truth, and have no policy.  I never even thought about it, although
obviously I should have.  But the one time that we did, whew!  Read
on...

 We got a large collection from a studio in eastern Utah, people I've
been working with for years to get the whole collection.  Well they
gave us the nitrates, mostly studio portraits, dating probably 1925
through the 1960s.  Some of the nitrates, in the fullness of time,
started to go, so we scanned them and destroyed the negatives
(and was that fun!  All are now safely stored in fireproof cabinets,
individual sleeves, in a cool dry dark place, in case you were
worried).  In the course of building up our website, I took the scans
we'd made from those negatives and I put them up on the web.  So
a while later I went out to the town where the daughter of the
photographer still lives, and as soon as I sat down she started
chewing me up one side and down the other, for "putting the
pictures on the internet without her permission."  I mean it's not
like they are lewd or objectionable or even remotely anything like
that (see for yourself:

http://www.lib.utah.edu/spc/photo/p272/p272.html

And in fact I wasn't sure what it was she was objecting to.  There's
really no commercial value to the images, either to her or to us,
and besides, she donated them to us and signed a deed of gift, so
it was perfectly within our legals to do what we did.  The only thing
I could figure, when my butt stopped smoking, was that she
somehow thought that having her name on the internet would make
her prey to pornographers or something.  Again, my fault: I didn't
even think of modifying the content and scope statement that
constitutes the little blurb on the collection page to delete her
name.  All I know is that it set my negotiations for the rest of the
collection back about ten years, and might have put paid to the
idea altogether.

And the interesting coda to this whole sorry occurence, no sooner
had I gotten back to the office that we got a letter from a woman in
Colorado who was disabled, completely house-bound and on a
fixed income, who had seen the page and found  a number of her
long-dead relatives in the list of portraits.  She gave us about fifteen
names, we were able to find negatives and make prints of about a
dozen of them, and you've never heard a person more thrilled or
grateful in your life, the kind of gratitude where you want to say Can
I put you on hold?, and get your library director on the line.  We
made that woman's day/month/year, and had those not been on
the internet she would never have known of it.  I could only wish
that had happened Before I went to visit the donor lady, and not
after!  Ah well!


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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