Marybeth PETERS reviewed copyright law in the United States and offered
advice during a lively discussion of this subject. But uncertainty
remains concerning the price of copyright in a digital medium, because a
solution remains to be worked out concerning management and synthesis of
copyrighted and out-of-copyright pieces of a database.
As moderator of the final session of the Workshop, Prosser GIFFORD directed
discussion to future courses of action and the potential role of LC in
advancing them. Among the recommendations that emerged were the following:
* Workshop participants should 1) begin to think about working
with image material, but structure and digitize it in such a
way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and
2) find a common way to build text and images together so that
they can be used jointly at some stage in the future, with
appropriate network support, because that is how users will want
to access these materials. The Library might encourage attempts
to bring together people who are working on texts and images.
* A network version of American Memory should be developed or
consideration should be given to making the data in it
available to people interested in doing network multimedia.
Given the current dearth of digital data that is appealing and
unencumbered by extremely complex rights problems, developing a
network version of American Memory could do much to help make
network multimedia a reality.
* Concerning the thorny issue of electronic deposit, LC should
initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed
responsibility, that is, bring together the distributed
organizations and set up a study group to look at all the
issues related to electronic deposit and see where we as a
nation should move. For example, LC might attempt to persuade
one major library in each state to deal with its state
equivalent publisher, which might produce a cooperative project
that would be equitably distributed around the country, and one
in which LC would be dealing with a minimal number of publishers
and minimal copyright problems. LC must also deal with the
concept of on-line publishing, determining, among other things,
how serials such as OJCCT might be deposited for copyright.
* Since a number of projects are planning to carry out
preservation by creating digital images that will end up in
on-line or near-line storage at some institution, LC might play
a helpful role, at least in the near term, by accelerating how
to catalog that information into the Research Library Information
Network (RLIN) and then into OCLC, so that it would be accessible.
This would reduce the possibility of multiple institutions digitizing
the same work.