Digitization of Industry Yearbooks
- April 9, 2009 @ 11:48ammglg2007 says:I am a graduate student at an educational institution and we (my group including one faculty member) want to scan and OCR 20 industry yearbooks published between 1975-1995. The books are currently out of print and are not available. The publisher still exists but is active in different area and we were not able to get any written response to whether we can use the books (they are ignoring us). We want to build a database from the data for research purposes (analyze industry trends) for publication in academic journals. We will not share the digital copy or the database with anyone else. Is this allowable under current copyright law? Thanks.
- April 9, 2009 @ 4:23pmFreya Anderson says:I have a question about this: Do you want to scan and OCR the yearbooks to allow your group to manipulate the data, or to make the yearbooks more widely available, that is, to provide access to your whole group? It may be allowable either way, but I think that the analysis would be different.
- April 10, 2009 @ 11:22ammglg2007 says:Freya, thank you for the reply. We (the group members) are primarily interested in the database that will be created after searching and processing of the data. The objective is not to make the books themselves more widely available. We thought about storing the scan/OCR version of the yearbooks for archival purposes but they could be deleted if legally necessary. Thanks again.
- April 15, 2009 @ 1:18pmJanetCroft says:This sounds like you are just doing if in order to share the yearbooks among the research group, and not the broader public. To me this sounds permissible. You may want to get rid of the scans once you are done working with them, but if you intend to do ongoing work with the data set I can't see a good reason to delete them and start over the next time. (And with my editor hat on, I'd say at least keep the scans till your reseach is in print and there's been a chance for readers to pose any questions they might have about your original data sources!)
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