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A Little Too Generous? - Part II



Sorry for the delay in responding to this topic last week, but I have been
out of the office a few days.  As a representative of the "other archive" in
Birmingham that received a visit from this researcher, I do feel as though I
should elaborate on the issue.

For someone to receive grant funding for "our" material - and I use that
term in the institutional sense - without our institution's cooperation or
(even) prior knowledge is almost unbelievable.  Regardless of who funded the
grant, we are now in a situation where a faculty member in another state has
received grant funds to digitize material not in the possession of her own
institution and not part of a previously arranged consortium or cooperative
effort.  These funds have been awarded to create an online archive to
contain digital images of each and every item (documents, photographs, oral
history interviews, maps, police reports, radio and video clips, etc.)
having to do with a particular subject.

We are well past the point of controlling the situation from the start.  We
were either included in the original grant submission without our knowledge
or the grant was very general and we are being included post-award.  I find
both hard to believe, but either way I plan to request a copy of the grant
before we provide any assistance for the project.

Other than the funding issue, I have grave concerns over copyright and our
institution's proprietary rights to the material in this repository.  The
grant recipient did not have a plan on how to address the copyright issue
even after I discussed it at length and tried to explain the massive process
ahead of her just to get permissions from all those parties who might hold
copyright to the material that she seeks for this online archive.  Many of
us hold material in our collections for which we don't hold the copyright
(e.g. letters from X to Y found in the Y manuscript collection, even though
Y or Y's estate signed over copyright at the time of donation).

As was noted in the original posting, how does participation affect the use
of our collection, especially if the participation complies with a research
request such as this (provide every item in the collection on a particular
topic so that it can be digitized and mounted onto an online archive).

The original posting last week asked for advice on how institutions would
handle this situation.  It also solicited information from repositories that
limit the number of copies provided to any one researcher.  I would
appreciate continued responses to both requests.

---------------------------------------------------
Tim L. Pennycuff, University Archivist
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
http://www.uab.edu/historical

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