Book People Archive

Archives and copyrights

> > http://www.shsw.wisc.edu/wcftr/index.htm
> >
> > --Andrew Lee Hunn (Attila)

>From: Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo@[redacted]>
>
>How much of the archive is in the public domain?  The other web page
>http://www.shsw.wisc.edu/copyright.html seems to suggest that the
>historical society wants to have complete control over how you
>use and copy their materials, even some of them are in the
>public domain.  If I understand correctly, why should I support
>them?
>
>Joseph Pietro Riolo
><riolo@[redacted]>

The page you're looking at is a general page meant to cover the collective 
Society's butt for copyright purposes.  Unless someone seems to be doing 
something illegal, which almost never happens, no request will be denied.  
(It's smack in the middle of the University of Wisconsin campus, and in this 
arena, there's an air of paranoia about plagiarism.)  And it only takes 
moments to "approve," especially if someone is here in person.  What it 
amounts to is that like any archive, SHSW wants to ensure that its 
collections are cited, and that it can keep tabs on the research being 
published.  (Got to add to the library; running an acquisitions office ain't 
cheap!)  Also, there are god-only-knows how many copyright holders whose 
works are here, and they can't just be handed out like candy.  This way, 
it's known who has asked to reproduce materials, so if the copyright holder 
has a problem, it's known who to direct them to.  The Society never makes 
money off of anything it hasn't itself copyrighted, meaning its own 
researched and published books, which are few and far between.

Honestly, copyright issues come up seldom, mostly just when someone wants to 
reproduce pictures for a book they're writing, and in many cases we can help 
them find whether there is a copyright holder, and how to get in touch.  
SHSW is a state agency, and public access is the goal.

This list is really interesting, because I work in the library at SHSW, and 
a great deal of our holdings are undoubtedly hard-to-find elsewhere and in 
the public domain.  One of the projects I'm helping out with is the 
cataloging of old Wisconsin news clippings for online searching.  From about 
the 1860's to the 1930's (we're guessing the depression caused a cutback in 
labor) some librarians devoted time to clipping out articles about Wisconsin 
and its people from local papers, and they pasted these onto cards, 
cataloging them with a really crappy cutter number system.  They're 
disintegrating now, so we had them all filmed and scanned into images on 
CD-ROM, and we're creating records for each article with MS Access.  (We 
thought about OCR, but the task would be enormous given the complexity, 
variation, and poor quality of much of the old clippings.  Maybe someday if 
the software improves and our tech guys feel up to it.  We'll always have 
the negatives...)  Many of these old newspapers are already on microfilm as 
a whole, but not in easily searchable form.  So this way, anyone with 
internet access will be able to search what's in this collection by whatever 
fields we've filled out, including subject, name, place, newspaper, etc., 
and pull up the image of the article, read it, and print it out.  They can 
come in and use our public access computers, as well.

--Andrew Lee Hunn (Attila)

P.S.  Might I add there seem to be many fine and eloquent people 
participating in this list.  Quite refreshing, given the nature of most 
listservs.  Give yourselves all a collective pat on the back!