copyright and digitization

Dear list members:

We are planning a project to digitize some printed materials and would like to place the digital images on the web. Several questions have come to mind:

1. Are the works of state and local officials copyrighted or are these items in the public domain along with any items created by agencies or employees of the federal government? I realize that for state and local documents, one must examine state laws to determine if these publications may be copyrighted, whereas most federal documents are in the public domain.
2. If we have documents in our collection that we suspect "may" be protected by copyright, can we digitize them, make them searchable on the web through the creation of an index, and paste the text of the documents into a database for searching WITHOUT publishing the FULL TEXT of those documents on the web?

The database will be searchable via the web, but users will not have access to the full text itself. When they perform a search, the software will search the text of the document and, if a hit is found, it will provide the user with the title of the document and its location within the collection. If they wish to review the document(s) in its entirety, they could come into our library and examine them, but would be expected to comply with any possible copyright stipulations.

Any information or suggestions that you have would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Burt Altman
Archivist, Claude Pepper Library
Florida State University Libraries
<baltman[_at_]mailer.fsu.edu> Received on Sat Jun 26 1999 - 20:16:57 GMT