Margaret Peachy's List: Digital Rights Management for Archives

The stickiest challenge regarding the use of digital cameras might be intellectual property. Traditionally, it has been thought that the archivist must have complete control over who copies what by physically copying everything (a great constraint on time and resources), or else, by giving the control to the researcher, the archivist must then relinquish the intellectual control she had over the documents, trusting the researcher to deal fairly with the images she took. Depending on the collection, after all, the importance of maintaining control over the documents must not be forgotten, and while copyright “is a ‘cultural bargain’ that encompasses the rights for the creator, for users, and for the public,” [62] the archivist invariably ends up in the middle and must “protect legal rights in the underlying content” [63] of its digital documents.

Control of how an image is used is the issue that is of greatest concern to most archival professionals in regard to patron use of digital cameras in the reading room. With digital images taken by patrons, one cannot be certain that information about the repository will ever be connected to the electronic surrogate of the original document. Additionally, archivists fear that the patron will misuse the image by publishing it in a book or posting it on a Web site without permission. An image of a document posted on a site that is devoid of the contextual information about the record group appears to be irresponsible in the eyes of many archivists. Elaine D. Engst of Cornell University tried to alleviate some of these fears when she stated, “To a certain extent, you have to trust people. Perhaps if we started to see large numbers of our images showing up in books without permission, we might think differently. But I think that most scholars are responsible” [65].

According to the Society of American Archives, "The deed of gift is a formal, legal, agreement that transfers ownership of, and legal rights in, the materials to be donated." A deed of gift form not only transfers ownership of the items, but also transfers the copyright (if applicable), and states what the new owner can and cannot do with the items.