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Re: copyright questions



Laura,

Here at the Digital Manuscripts Project at the National Library of Medicine, unpublished letters are handled individually as are diaries.  Usually, it is the person who wrote the letter that retains copyright so anyone who wanted to publish the letters would have to get that person's permission to do so. (If the writer of the letters is dead, then the copyright reverts to a spouse or nearest living relative.)  Even in a deed of gift, the donor usually retains copyright although he or she may also give the INSTITUTION permission to publish their letters.  The institution does NOT own the copyright and any third party wishing to publish needs to contact the writer of the letters themselves.

As for photographs, it is the photographer that owns the copyright, although that often can be an impossible task to find out who took a particular photo.  In may cases, a phrase such as "Courtesy of ........" can be used by an institution where the copyright owner is known but can't easily be contacted.

I'm not familar with the process of "registering" collections and I don't believe my Manuscript Department does this, but I supposed it could be used where there is no way to contact the writer of the letters or the writer's kin. As an archivist, I would be uneasy using a phrase such as "Reproduced with permission of the XYZ Archives".

Hope this helps,

Gregory Pike, C. A.
Digital Manuscript Project       History Associates, Inc.
National Library of Medicine   5 Choke Cherry Road #280
Bethesda, MD 20894             Rockville, MD 20820
pikeg@mail.nlm.nih.gov

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