We plan to publish material from Mass Observation (MO) correspondents who wrote in the 1980s and interviewees whose oral history records are held at the British Library.
We were initially optimistic about not needing permission for publishing MO material, as the MO Archive already had copyright assigned by some correspondents, while others had signed various permission sheets. As MO is an on-going project, we wanted to do the right thing and not risk reputational damage or put off any current or future contributors, so our approach needed to be pragmatic and low risk.
We spoke with Naomi Korn from JISC’s IPR consultancy who proved really helpful. Her view was that the assigned copyright did not mean that correspondents had waived their moral rights in their material, and that if we were going to make it openly available for re-purposing we should seek permission.
We identified approximately 90 MO correspondents who had written in the 1980s, and were still writing and easily contactable. After reviewing their material for suitability, we decided to seek permission from all of them. Potentially this gives us a large enough sample to draw on, while doing away with the need to track down people who are no longer writing, which would be time-consuming, costly and potentially fruitless.
In late January MO sent out letters with an information sheet explaining the project and the Creative Commons licence under which material will be published. So far we’ve had a good response.
Our other population is people who have contributed oral history interviews to the British Library. Many of them have assigned copyright permission to the British Library and some material is openly available to British Library users. For others the copyright is held by a third party, such as the BBC, and for yet others it is unclear. The British Library Oral History Curator and Director of National Life Stories, Rob Perks, has extensive experience and we discussed the appropriate approach. He takes the view that where the British Library holds copyright we will not need to seek further permission. Again this is based on both pragmatism and the level of risk with which we, and the British Library, are comfortable. Depending on our final selection of material we may have to seek permission from some, but not others.
Having talked to other projects about their specific copyright challenges, there seem to be a couple of key things to bear in mind:
- Get advice
- Talk with the curators or owners of the material you want to use to establish attitude to risk
- Record discussions and decisions so there is an audit trail showing how and why you have taken a particular approach
- Provide an explanation of how you will use material for copyright holders and record activities involved in contacting them and seeking permissions.
Watch this space for further updates on how our approach works out.