Archives, Digitisation and Copyright

– Prof Martin Kretschmer
– Dr Ian Anderson
– Ms Victoria Stobo
Summary
Archives play a vital role in linking people with their communities and their heritage, and in shaping democracy, public policy, education, research, history, and culture. While the digital environment has posed many challenges to archives concerning the long-term preservation of records, it has also altered society’s expectations about access to those records. This project provided the first in-depth study of the role that copyright plays in shaping the behaviour of the UK’s archival institutions, while also developing policy recommendations to enable those institutions to make their archival collections available online within a simple, straightforward, and easily understood copyright regime. The first phase of the project will use the Wellcome Digital Library as a case study for assessing the pros and cons of adopting a risk based approach to copyright.
Project outputs include:
- Copyright and e-learning: a guide for practitioners. Archives and Records – book review (2017)
- The European Commission’s public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules: a response by the CREATe Centre – This Working Paper presents the response prepared by the CREATe Centre to the EC’s public consultation on a wide-ranging review of EU copyright rules which ran between December 5, 2013 and March 5, 2014.
- Writing About Comics and Copyright – This Working Paper considers the extent to which academics – or indeed anyone interested in writing about comics – can rely upon UK copyright law to reproduce extracts and excerpts from published comics and graphic novels without having to ask the copyright owner for permission.
- Archives and Copyright: Developing an Agenda for Reform – This Working Paper is the authoritative, paginated and citable version of the Symposium “Archives and Copyright: Developing an Agenda for Reform” which was held at the Wellcome Trust on 27 September 2013.
- Archives and Copyright: Developing an Agenda for Reform – This resource has been produced as an orientation point in critically assessing how copyright shapes the work of archives as it relates to preservation and access.
- Archives and Copyright: Risk and Reform – This working paper considers the place of the archive sector within the copyright regime, and how copyright impacts upon the preservation, access to, and use of archival holdings.
- Response to the technical review of draft legislation for copyright exceptions (second batch) Amendments to Exceptions for Research, Libraries and Archives
- Copyright Exceptions for Parody and Quotation and Personal Copying for Private Use
- Response to the Government’s Consultation on Orphan Works
- Project poster – Project activities have been summarised in this poster which was presented at the CREATe All Hands conference in September 2014.