Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

We are uncertain how to proceed with further digitization of our college’s student newspapers. Currently, the newspapers published between 1948 and 2016 are digitized. They were made available online through a page hosted on the college’s website as well as the NYS Historic Newspapers database.

Since the mid-2010s, articles from the newspaper have been published simultaneously online and in the print edition distributed across campus.

The college’s administration received a complaint from a company called Copytrack regarding two images used in past issues of the paper. The college’s response was to scrub the images from the online archive of past issues and restrict access to the archives, effectively removing the entire digitized collection of its archives from the newspaper’s website.

However, since the issues in question were from 2017 and 2018, the digitized collection still remains intact on NYS Historic Newspapers, where the library has it hosted. We’re uncertain what weight this complaint from Copytrack holds and hope to digitize the remainder of the publication soon, within the bounds of copyright restrictions.

After this copyright complaint, is it advisable to leave the collection in NYS Historic Newspapers and continue adding to it, or should we plan to take it down and only digitize future copies for in-house preservation purposes?

An academic librarian relayed this question from a researcher/author:

"I am in the stage of tracking down photo permissions and have found images originally published by U.S. presses from the late 1800s and early 1900s (1887, 1893) that are now defunct--hence I cannot request photo permissions from them. The images are posted online by historical societies, but I'm not sure if they're in the public domain or not.   I plan to reach out to the society publishing the images on their digital archives, and credit them for using the images, but is there any other factor to consider?"

My institution has a small number of documents in our archives related to previous graduate students. Some are definitely educational records (transcripts, field placement evaluations). Then there are a) letters of recommendation received by the school or written by school faculty/administrators and sent to other schools, b) some correspondence between a student and the school/administration, and other items like c) copies of images or articles from student publications.

The documents span decades.   Most --- but not all--- of these former students are confirmed deceased. Most items in this small group of documents relate to alumni who were/are notable, but in widely varying degrees.

A few of these documents concern a famous alum, who passed away.  An outside researcher is asking about the documents related to that alum, and unfortunately, there are no surviving institutional access policies related to student records or unpublished correspondence in our archives. We want to respect copyright, FERPA, and the alum's estate.

For the educational records, I can't find clear guidance on how long FERPA access restrictions last, but other academic collections seem to allow access 50-75 years after the former student's death.

So, a few questions:

1) When should on-site access to historical educational records be allowed (if ever), with reference to FERPA? What about providing copies of historical educational records?
 

2) When should on-site access to unpublished, non-educational records related to former students be allowed, in reference to state and federal copyright and privacy laws, and possibly FERPA? What about providing copies of these documents?
 

3) Should we take a more risk-averse approach to high-profile alumni materials, or should our policies apply equally to all alums?