Presented at ACRL 2013 on April 11, 2013

1. The sun comes in by James Cridland http://www.flickr.com/photos/18378655@N00/2272781234 CC
BRAVING THE PRESENT:
Experience and Copyright Risk
Assessment
for Digitizing Recent Historical Collections
Katie Fortney
@kfortney

2. www.gdao.org

3. We didn’t get sued.
Why would you expect anyone to sue us?
How we prepared for launch
What the reaction has been
Now what?
Our Trip by Frisno http://www.flickr.com/photos/frisno/2917037253/ CC BY-NC-N

4. Some would consider
this
a risky project.
DK publishing
got sued
over rock posters
Fair Use x 23,000!
Photographs!
Unpublished
Works!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/3308644581/ No known restriction

5. Before diving in, we balanced
realistic assessment of risks
against the goals we wanted to
reach.
Fair Project
use quality
Communit
y goodwill
em marte tem piscina by Srta. Lobo http://www.flickr.com/photos/44896544@N00/126843186 CC BY-NC

6. We made ourselves available,
and tried to make some friends.
Leveraging
existing
relationships
Letter and
license
campaign
Easy to find
contact
information
Shake by bradjreynolds http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradjreynolds/4222512371/ CC BY-NC-ND

7. We have taken down a few
things.
• 23,000 items as fair use
–209 e-mails to archive
• 37 from creators
–15 resulting in takedown
»7 of those 15 would have been
happy with redaction (the rest didn’t
say)
• 0 claims of copyright
otto kopriva by batintherain http://www.flickr.com/photos/82995349@N00/398033423 CC BY-NC-S

8. People liked finding their
stuff!
“How incredibly cool to see it again after
all this time, I was 17 when I drew it. Just
wanted to say THANK YOU for bringing
back some awesome memories!”
“Seeing my envelope art was a trip
and it brought a big smile to my
face.”
“I can't tell you what a gift this is!!!”
“sweet jesus…YOU MADE OUR DA
nik's fancy crayons by Greencolander http://www.flickr.com/photos/37539977@N00/387073

9. We were not the first ones
to arrive at this party.
“Despite extensive research, the Library has
been unable to identify all possible rights
holders in the materials in this collection.
Thus, some of the materials provided here
online are made available under an
assertion of fair use.” – Library of Congress
1999

10. … but the party’s
still not as big as it should be.
“When they did digitize, as most did, they
almost universally chose to digitize public
domain materials first, regardless of scholarly
needs, in order to avoid copyright questions in
the short (or even medium) run.”
-Fair Use Challenges in
Academic and Research Libraries, 2010

11. When are we going to start
asking the right questions
when we select
collections for digitization?
Untitled by Ciccio Pizzettaro http://www.flickr.com/photos/70038540@N00/1917885551 CC BY-NC-

12. You can convince your
gatekeepers.
You have help.
arl.org/fairuse publications.arl.org/rli279/

13. Questions
?
@kfortney
katie.fortney@ucop.edu
slideshare.net/katiefortney
iknowiknow by renedepaula http://www.flickr.com/photos/41867887@N00/167679756 CC BY-NC-N