On 9 Nov 2016, at 09:09, Pamela Birch <[log in to unmask]> wrote [for example]:
> If you order a document but don't copy it there is no charge, but if you photograph a document you can take as many shots of it as you like for private use under copyright regulations. We don't like the forms but in order to have a record of what was copied for private use (most of our holdings still having some copyright on them that does not belong to us) ..
I run the web site A Vision of Britain through Time, and have to raise funding, mainly through data licensing, to keep 1.6 staff in post, so I am not querying the need to generate income.
However, I am querying the assumption in several of the responses that every digital image scanned or photographed by/for archive users should automatically be restricted to “private study”.
— Although documents that enable genealogists to extend their family trees are a large and obvious exception, there will never be a commercial case for digitising the majority of archival documents.
— Even if _all_ new deposits were “born digital”, I am pretty sure that, at the present rate, it would take some centuries to digitise that majority via non-commercial projects e.g. HLF funded. This is partly because the other costs of digitisation projects (metadata creation, CMS and web site procurement, design, etc) dwarf the cost of the actual scanning.
This means that the only way most documents are ever going to be available online is if users are allowed to put them there, through small scale and sometimes messy processes.
I will give just one example of the kind of activity I would like to see enabled. We recently launched, with the National Libraries of Wales and of Scotland, the GB1900 project which is crowd-sourcing the transcription of all the place names on all the 6-inch maps of Britain from around 1900 (www.gb1900.org). That basic task is going well (we will hit our first million transcriptions this week), but if you poke around the interface you will find there is a mechanism for adding place-names taken from other sources. The form for doing that asks for details of the source, but if we were developing a new system from scratch (we basically inherited the code from an earlier project), I would want to encourage users to upload a copy of the document, enabling others to both better assess the reliability of the source and allow others to check the actual transcription of the name, which with the pre-1800 sources we are most interested in is likely to be problematic. For a rather different take on the basic idea of historical gazetteer construction by gathering in geographic names from historical documents, see the Pelagios project’s Recogito site (www.pelagios.org/recogito), which would arguably benefit greatly if it were able to include more of the source documents.
There are clearly many archival documents where publication of digital images needs to be restricted, either because of genuine commercial potential or because someone other than the archive owns copyright. However, where this isn’t true users should be allowed to “publish” online. There probably need to be some restrictions inhibiting genuinely commercial use. My own project has spent something like £2m on digitisation: our digital boundary data are clearly worth real money, and we are unapologetic about trying to make money out of them. However, even trying quite hard, we have failed to generate significant licensing income out of anything else, so we now try to make other digital stuff available under a Creative Commons — Attribution — Share Alike license (the same as Wikipedia and Open Street Map). One policy would be to enable users to upload make appropriate categories of image for online use, but requiring them to use a similar open license to inhibit straightforwardly commercial use. (NB straightforward bans on "commercial use” are problematic, but that is another discussion).
Humphrey Southall
Professor of Historical Geography/
Director, GB Historical GIS
University of Portsmouth
Geography Dept, Buckingham Bldg,
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE, UK
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