Recently Asked Questions

We have an archive in our Library. We recently got a large donation of research that was used by the donor in the process of researching a book (we have the book in our catalog).

We were hoping the research was primary and original, but upon review, it largely consisted of:

• PDFs of full books taken from Google Books 
• PDFs of book excerpts taken from Google Books
• PDFs of articles with no identifying publication information
• PDFs/Word Documents with excerpts copied and pasted from websites and articles without attribution

This set off major alarm bells!

To complicate things, we have been so busy running our institution, our policies have not been updated to address concerns about “born digital” donations. And of course, we want to keep up a good relationship with the donor, who is a local author.

Is there a disclaimer or notice we can put on the online repository to protect us from potential copyright lawsuits? Is this a situation where every PDF book and document should be researched first to determine if it is in the public domain or protected by fair use? Should we simply refuse to put any of those documents online due to the risk?

Sincerely,
Discombobulated about Donations

Recently, our library has been given a collection of photographs that were previously on display in a local business location. These are photos of the customers of the business, many are children. These photos span several decades and are important to many. 

We would like to digitize these photos and make them available via the internet because we believe these to be of sentimental, cultural, historical and academic value to our region and beyond.

The photos were given to our library by the business that had previously displayed them and also produced the photos. What are the issues of rights and permissions raised by making these images freely available online, especially given that many of those in the photos are children? Thanks for your help.