Copyright Issue

One of today's big issues was a question concerning a lecture recital dissertation from 1976 from the CUA School of Music. (The Archives holds the record copy of the School of Music's recordings from the 1930s to the present.)

The ILL department from a university in Dublin, Ireland contacted us on behalf of a student to try and acquire this dissertation, not immediately knowing what the format was. International ILL has been performed for printed dissertations in the past. The university was still interested in receiving a copy of the reel-to-reel dissertation recording, and I have recently set up an in-house digitization station for this size of reels, so I was anxious to complete this request.

However, at CUA students hold the copyright to dissertations, unless stated otherwise. We have recently started to share textual dissertations in an online institutional repository (as PDFs) so this request would not be much different. I had to contact out University General Counsel Office to find out if I could create a digital copy of this tape.

Currently, the Archives allows researchers to use originals of dissertations (textual, and the audio for which we have playing equipment). This is not an archival quality practice, but a practical one that involves the least amount of work; we were also not able to digitize reels until recently. We are also re-thinking a lot of our current policies to include advances in technology.

Is it possible to create a digital copy of this tape for international distribution (sort of like creating a PDF of a paper dissertation)? Is there a specific date that unpublished dissertations become public domain? What steps do we need to take and what sort of permissions would we need to acquire to create a digital copy if we are not immediately able to?

The answer is pending...