OTHER TOPICS
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.