The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) has published a strategy for providing access to unpublished materials online based on an approach created by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.
This approach is described in a document titled, 'Well-intentioned practice for putting digitised collections of unpublished materials online' and is the output of an 'Undue Diligence' invitational seminar held in the spring of 2010. During this event, OCLC Research convened a group of RLG Partner experts from archives, special collections and the law to develop and define streamlined, community-accepted procedures for managing copyright in the digital age that would cut costs and boost confidence in libraries' and archives' ability to increase visibility of and access to unpublished materials online.
The group acknowledged that, although there is risk in digitising materials that may be in copyright, this risk should be balanced with the harm to scholarship and society inherent in not making collections fully accessible. Based on this premise, they identified a practical approach to selecting collections, making decisions, seeking permissions, recording outcomes, establishing policy and working with future donors, which OCLC Research staff outlined in the 'Well-intentioned practice' document and posted online.
Since then, a community of practice has formed around these procedures and many professional organisations have publicly endorsed them.
Based on this growing agreement within the profession, the TRLN member libraries created a Network's Intellectual Property Rights Strategy for Digitization of Modern Manuscript Collections and Archival Record Groups to specify the risk management practices to support their large scale digitisation project called 'Content, Context, and Capacity: A Collaborative Digitization Project on the Long Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina.' This project will present free and open online access to a total of forty digitised manuscript collections or archival record groups, accompanied by the broad summary descriptions and contents lists found in the finding aids created when the collections were processed.
For the first time, these resources will cross the boundaries of the four libraries' reading rooms, bringing together a vast quantity of research material for the era between the 1930s and 1980s. This free and open online availability of full collections is expected to facilitate new scholarly collaborations across institutions, and even nations, and will support the development of educational tools for students and the use of primary sources in classrooms.
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