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

Our local public library has started a collection of donated yearbooks from the high school. They requested to receive or purchase new yearbooks as they were published. As the yearbook contains underage students, information about their sports and clubs, we felt that this was protected personal information and should not be publicly accessible. The understood "agreement" when participating in the yearbook implies that this publication is available only to the current school population. People who are not enrolled, employed, or related to a current student have theoretically been ineligible to purchase a yearbook (it really doesn't come up so no formal policy is in place). We feel that it is a mismatch between telling students to not share personal details and then willingly handing over a roadmap of what meetings and practices they will be attending. Thank you!

Since the 1970s, Villa Maria College has published an annual anthology of student work called Skald (https://www.villa.edu/campus-life/skald/). This anthology is printed and distributed to students, faculty, staff, and prospective students who visit our admissions office. The anthology is also shared with the Columbia Scholastic Press Association as part of their Crown competition.

While we have made the most recent edition available on our college website using the Issuu tool, we would like to digitize the older editions and make them available as a collection in New York Heritage or New York Historic Newspapers. However, as far as I am aware, we have never formally asked the students to waive their copyrights or give us copyright permissions for digital publication as part of the anthology submission process. We certainly would not have asked about alternate format publication copyrights when the magazine was first established as these formats did not yet exist for the general public.

My question then is, would we be within copyright law to digitize and place these magazines online? Villa owns the copyright to the magazine as a whole and the design and layout as the original publisher, but I want to make sure that the copyrights of the individual pieces within the anthology will not supersede our copyright and create legal liability for the college.

We at [redacted higher ed institution] are considering digitizing our past yearbooks and storing them in an institutional repository which has the option of materials being password protected or available publicly. We are also considering using these photos in future advertising materials. I was wondering what is the best practice for determining the copyright status of the photographs in these yearbooks? Should we attempt to contact the subjects of the yearbooks to inform them that their yearbook photos will be published in our institutional repository or used in school advertising?

(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.

My question is: can we scan and put online menus dated after 1977 (and especially more recent – up until 2021) if it is for educational purposes? If we do scan them, would we need permissions from every single chef/owner? The copyright status of menus in general has always seemed murky to me, but I don’t even know where to go to find clear answers for this situation.