Legal Issues for Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

Learn how to navigate issues in the changing legal landscape that arise in providing access to and using cultural heritage materials in the digital environment.

Researchers, including members of the general public, and all practitioners working in libraries and archives must navigate the legal issues-copyright, privacy, and contract-inherent in cultural heritage materials, particularly when practitioners want to make them available to users online and those users find and reuse them.

Not all librarians and archivists feel prepared to address every issue that arises, whether due to rapidly changing technology, uses, or evolution of the law. This book educates and empowers librarians and archivists with foundational tools and activities for thinking about and addressing legal issues in cultural heritage materials, in addition to providing current, relevant explanations of legal and policy topics geared to the library and archives environment.

Legal Issues for Digital Cultural Heritage Collections addresses current, timely questions, but it also serves as an ongoing reference for how to think through issues before they arise, ensuring that policies and practices are in place. It builds upon and updates existing foundational works, but it is suitable for novice and experienced library and archives practitioners.

Author Biography

Heather Briston is the Director of the Scholarship Tools and Methods program at the UC San Diego Library, USA.