Digitisation and Copyright
John Laurie
Digital Initiatives Librarian
The University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services
Digital Library SIG Workshop
LIANZA Conference, 2014
Copyright conundrums
• 50 years after death of the author or photographer
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Multiple copyrights within one book
Multiple authors in serials
Anonymous articles
Copyright agreement with print publisher?
In the absence of a written agreement copyright remains with
the creator
• ORPHAN WORKS – copyright owners, heirs, uncontactable,
would have no objection to having their work online
• No register of contact details
Multiple copyrights
• Sections of J.W. Stack’s
diary – he died in 1919
• Foreword, introduction and
footnotes by A. H. Reed,
died 1975
• Reed editions 1935
• Illustrations, photos
• Located heirs at Alfred
and Isabel and Marion Reed
Trust, for permission
Multiple copyrights 2
• Multiple creators
• Includes poems, art, photos
stories, adapted stories
• Many well-known authors
and artists
• New Zealand, Britain,
Australia and other places
• Key resource for NZ studies
• Note controversies over
similar material for schools
in Japan, Palestine, 1914
Serbia
NZ School Journal 1938, Part III
The first 110 pages of the 1938 School Journal Part III has
stories (many adapted) from named authors Barbara Sleigh (d.
1982), Ian Hay (d. 1952), Cecil Roberts (d. 1976), Vitaly
Bianchi (translated from Russian, d. 1959), Minnie Pallister,
George Eliot (d. 1880), Louis Barnett (d. 1946) and John
Bunyan (d. 1688); poems from Punch by “Dum Dum”, W. A.
Bennett, and L. Du Garde Peach (d. 1974); other poems by John
Masefield (d. 1967), “Meredith”, T. Sturge Moore (d. 1944),
Wilfred Wilson Gibson (d. 1962), Andrew Lang, Robert Browning
(d. 1889), C. Fox Smith (d. 1954) K. M. MacKay, Leon Gellet,
George Kenyon, James Elroy Flecker (d. 1915) and Charles
Harpur (d. 1868), as well as unattributed photos and
illustrations and stories, extracts from the Pilgrim’s Progress,
and a play by Bernard Shaw (d. 1950).
[Note: multiple authors for some articles, pseudonyms,
translations, adapted stories]
NZ Copyright Act: Section 55, copying by
librarians or archivists, and 56A,
communicating digital copies to authenticated
users
• Sn 55(3), “at risk of loss, damage, or destruction.”
• Sn 56A single concurrent user per work (story or poem).
• next person wanting to download the PDF to wait for 5
minutes from the last download.
• PDF/A archival files, protected from alteration and
modification
• A Copyright notice - private study and no further copies.
• Print issues withdrawn from circulation except where
researchers need to view originals.
Other strategies
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Permission from print publishers
Society publishers – resolution at society AGM
Take-down notices
Risk management approach?
• NZ Copyright Act – claims must be based on loss of revenue,
court costs – no exemplary damages.
• Some NZ literary heirs strongly defend their copyrights
Digitisation:
Wikimedia and Flickr
You have some historic photos you want to put online
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Search
Zoom in
Search engine visibility
Easy to use
• Wikimedia Commons
• Flickr
Ugly front page! Strange focus on browsing, not searching, already logged in…
Flickr is even worse – see themselves as social networking sites?
Wikimedia Commons
• One file at a time
• All works hosted at the
Commons must be legal to
publish in the United States.
• All images must be freely
available
CC attribution and share alike
licences
• {{PD-heirs}}
• Title and description
• No date range
Editing page
• Can’t edit title
Title becomes
filename
• No bulk editing
• No sorting
Flickr
• Bulk upload
• “Albums” can be
sorted, batch edited
• Title displays on hover
• Album metadata
• Sort by date taken
• 1 TB of free storage
• Pay to remove
advertisements – c
$50 per year.
• LC displaying photos
on Flickr since 2008
• Flickr Commons
Metadata entry page
Date
Room for description here
Part of an album
Tags for subjects
Can be words or phrases
Restrictions
Flickr advanced search
Not too bad:
Can search your own
photos, everybody’s.
Date taken
Keyword and phrase
Web indexing:
Within a week the photos have
been picked up by Google, and
some added to other people’s
collections
Flickr and Preservation??
• “Are my photos ever deleted?”
“No, your photos will not be deleted, unless
you do it yourself, or fail to play by
our Community Guidelines.”
• Need to retain further backup, preservation
copies
John Laurie
Text and Image Collections
University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services
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Early New Zealand Books (ENZB)
Journal of the Polynesian Society (JPS)
New Zealand Journal of History (NZJH)
Early New Zealand Statutes (ENZS)
The Bookshelf
• History of the University of Auckland
• Anthropology Photographic Archive
• Exam papers