Not Everything Should be Scanned, Part II

                        Prioritizing what to scan is key to having a digital archive that is accessible and worthwhile from a research prospective.  Sometimes that can be hard.  There are some rules that dictate what can or cannot be made accessible to the public.  Those rules, actually laws, apply to physical papers as well as digital material.  Specifically the laws that cover accessibility are privacy and copyright.  Some donors request that their material not be made available until after their death.  Lyndon Johnson’s papers were not available for study until after Lady Bird died, for example.  Privacy laws also govern accessibility of some material such as school records, medical histories, employee records.  Copyright laws apply to a wide range of materials including PhD dissertations, Master’s theses.  Some of this material can be scanned and kept in a dark archives.  Access is restricted and managed by the archive.  Some material is only accessible at the archival facility even if it has been digitized.  Each institution has to address the privacy and copyright issues for every collection and each institution develops its own rules.  Lawyers need to be consulted when a policy is being developed.

                        Copyright and privacy concerns are the main considerations in what to scan and what not to scan, but there are other issues.  One question to ask is whether the material is already on line in another website.  That is true for some of the collections in the institutions where I have worked.  One library has stereo cards, a 19^th century invention of two images on a card that create a 3D picture when viewed through a stereoscope.  Apparently the cards were part of the library material available to patrons at the turn of the century.  When the librarian in charge of the digitization project determined that the cards were already on line, the decision was made not to scan them.  Another institution made a different decision for their material some of which was on line already and is also copyrighted.  They decided to scan as a preservation mechanism, but have not as yet posted the images on the website.  My vote would be not to duplicate what is already at another website and not to take a chance posting copyright material.  Use the storage space for something original and avoid copyright questions and repetition.