Permissions Limbo: Intellectual Property and Licensing Issues

Abstract

The world as we knew it changed sometime in the early 1990s—maybe a little bit before or maybe a little bit after, but it most definitely changed. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, not only do libraries, archives, and museums have to perform their traditional tasks—collecting, preserving, studying, researching, displaying, and providing access to collections in physical spaces—but there is now an expectation, if not a mandate, to create digital surrogates of the works in institutional collections, especially rare and unique materials, and make them accessible electronically. In addition to making good quality digital copies, . . .