Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 8
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| Hardening the Target In the Face of AI Bots [This question came to use in response to the RAQ Does the Rise of AI Mean Public Libraries Should Stop Posting Policies to Ensure Security?, where a footnote said “It is possible we are long past the end of the “open internet,” and more things need to be restricted, both for legal and operational reasons. Hopefully we’ll get a question about that soon, because I have a lot to say.”] Can we talk about putting things behind a log-in to avoid misappropriation of content? I have pretty much taken this question from the 10/14/25 Ask The Lawyer’s “Does the Rise of AI Mean Public Libraries Should Stop Posting Policies to Ensure Security?” response. It strikes me as an important topic as I recently read the Library Journal September 2025 article “AI Bots Cause Slowdowns, Crashes” (on pages 12-13). |
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| Student Newspaper Archives, Fair Use, Licensing, and the DMCA 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? |
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| NYS Documentation in the Public Domain I am of the understanding that NYS departments documentation falls under public domain. Can you provide any insight into this? Thank you! |
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| Permissions for Photos from Defunct Publications 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?" |
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| Copyright protocols for restaurant menus (Question has been slightly modified to maintain anonymity) We have been digitizing restaurant, hotel and other menus from our historical menu collection and have been following standard copyright protocols – but also making many case-by-case decisions based on things like whether of the establishment still exists, etc. (With only a couple exceptions I made for a faculty member who had permission of the restaurant owners, I haven’t scanned any menus from after 2000.) Our public collection site is used by students and researchers around the world. |