Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

[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).

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?

In April 2024, the Federal Register published the US Department of Justice’s final rule on Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The rule includes specific requirements for state and local governments to ensure that web content and mobile applications are accessible to people with disabilities. My question is related to the applicability of Title II to the online collections of public academic libraries, and more specifically, to born-digital archival collections, i.e., archival collections consisting of materials originating in a computer environment.

According to the rule, state and local entities must follow the technical standard outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA. However, this rule allows for five exceptions: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-28/section-35.201.

I understand the updated regulation does not override the existing obligations under Title II to make reasonable modifications on an individual basis, but it is unclear if Title II applies to born-digital archival collections, or if these collections fall under the exceptions linked above.

I am of the understanding that NYS departments documentation falls under public domain. Can you provide any insight into this? Thank you!

Our museum has an item on long-term loan that is potentially pretty valuable--a 200-yr old document.

We no longer wish to have this item in our custody unless it is gifted to us outright, and no longer on loan.

The gentleman who loaned it to us lives out of state and is considering donating the item to us, but is currently consulting with his attorneys to decide if he should gift the item to us (a non-profit museum) for tax deduction benefits or ask us to return it to sell the item elsewhere.

He is basing this decision on appraisals done by a company that has not seen the object in question in person for nearly 20 years (the length of time it has been on loan to us), and only has photographs to go by. These appraisals were paid for by the potential donor.

Our museum does not do appraisals, nor can we afford one of our own, so we have no way of knowing if the item is worth what he says it is. Is there any potential legal ramification to us if we decide to accept the item into our collection as a donation with the value he has listed (around $20,000)- i.e. in a situation like a tax audit?