Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Today I continued going through the sports contact sheets looking for women's basketball team photographs. I am currently in the early 1990s.

Brad Cook, my supervisor, spent part of the day showing me some of the requests he has received this week for permission to publish images from the University Archives collections. He also explained to me how he keeps track of the requests and determines what fees should apply in each situation. The fees vary depending on the purpose for which the image will be used, the collection the image comes from, and whether the requester is purchasing one-time use rights or in perpetuity rights.

The Will Counts collection and the Charles Cushman collection are among the most popular image collections at the University Archives, and most of the requests for permission to publish are for images from one of these two collections. Charles Cushman donated about 14,500 slides to the University Archives. These photographs were taken from 1938 to 1969 in the United States and elsewhere and are available in an online collection. Will Counts is best known for his "Scream" image of Hazel Massery yelling at Elizabeth Eckford as she enters Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas when that school was being desegregated in 1957.

Brad also showed me the files he maintains of permission to publish transactions which are still open. While most of these transactions go smoothly, problems sometimes arise when the individual or publisher that has requested permission to publish images from the University Archives collections fails to pay the fees, does not properly credit the University Archives, or fails to send two copies of the published work to the University Archives, all of which the contract they must sign to receive and use the images requires them to do.

Most of the requested images are used in books or articles, but some of the requests or more unusual. For instance, several years ago an image was requested by a restaurant owner for use on the placemats in his business, and we recently received a request to use images from one of the collections in a multimedia art project in a museum.