If you have older titles or archive materials which you’d like to digitise, but rights issues are getting in the way, here are 4 quick questions you might like to examine…
There’s hardly a publisher anywhere, I’m pretty confident in saying, who doesn’t have a few titles lurking in a corner, undigitised, because there are rights issues. Copyright in the main text of the books might be sorted out, with author contracts happily in place, but something along the way prevents those titles from being turned into digital form and enjoying an extended life online.
This might seem surprising to those of you who don’t work in publishing houses. (This newsletter goes out to a wide range of people: readers are just as likely to come from professional societies and academic institutions, as from the world of publishing – and welcome to you all!)
Often, the reason certain titles cannot be digitised is connected to the images. Pictures might come from a range of different sources, and clearing them again for digital use would mean additional time and cost.
Other types of material can have different kinds of obstacles, but the fundamental issues for corporates, societies and book or journal publishers are largely the same.
There are 4 key questions to start with, if you want to digitise archival material of any kind, and you know there might be trouble ahead.
Do you know where the paperwork is? – A basic question, perhaps, but it’s key to figuring out what the gaps are, and where to go next. If there’s nothing in the file (it happens), try looking for acknowledgements and captions in the printed work itself. What details can you see? You’ll still need to research who those copyright holders are and where to find them, but it gives you a starting point.
Can you figure out how many different copyright holders are involved? – Start with a list of all the items, but really the thing that will make a difference to your rights research is the number of sources, not the number of items. That’s because each rights holder represents a search, a conversation and potentially a negotiation, whether it’s for one small item, or a list of many.
Do most of the rights holders still exist? – More tricky than it sounds, this one, as content gets bought and sold on a fairly regular basis, folded into new companies and taken over again by someone else. But if your list includes a good proportion of recognisable, current names, your work will be much reduced.
What’s your approach to publishing risk? – Lovely as it would be to carry on searching for historical rights holders until we’ve exhausted every single possibility, that’s just not feasible in today’s world where time and resources are limited. So you need to prioritise.
Which content is going to be most important to the digitised work? Which items represent a high risk if you can’t locate the rights holder, and how do you go about creating a research log for those items you really can’t identify?
The answer lies in balancing a combination of factors against each other: the high or low publishing risk can depend on the copyright status (how old is it and where is it from?), the type of source (do they still exist? who else might hold rights nowadays?), and the way you plan to use the material (in an ebook? for a client? in e-learning?).
Nothing can be safer than a proper permission licence, but if that’s really not possible, you can go a long way to reducing your risks by having a clear process in place, and an audit trail to show the steps you have taken.