Digital Archives: Navigating the Legal Shoals Symposium

March 31, 2010

Digital Archives:
Navigating the Legal Shoals

Columbia Law School
Friday, April 16, 2010

Presented in conjunction with the Rockefeller Archive Center

FREE for law students if you register by APRIL 2! (http://www.law.columbia.edu/kernochan/symposia/digital-archives)

On Friday, April 16, 2010, Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts will host a day-long symposium on the legal issues that can arise in digitizing archives and making them publicly available online.

Archives and library special collections are repositories of cultural history. They may consist of the writings and correspondence of a particular individual or the records and collections of an organization. They may focus on a specific category of works – e.g. manuscripts, video or sound recordings, photographs, or advertisements and other “ephemera” – or they may embrace a wide range of different types of works. But most archives share a common goal: the desire to take advantage of the internet to make their holdings more easily accessible to scholars around the world.

This symposium – directed to lawyers, archivists, librarians and educators – will focus on legal hurdles facing archives in digitizing existing works (and in collecting “born digital” materials) and making them publicly available over the internet. Leading academics, archivists and legal professionals will address a range of issues, including