Considerations on policies of university digital collections

Abstract

We examine the factors (creation type of the material, acquisition method, copyright ownership etc.) and the access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of ten leading university digital libraries. We classify the policies according to the factors and analyze their relation, showing how the acquisition method and the copyright ownership define the access and reproduction policies for the digital collections. We conclude with rules about which factors lead to specific policies. For example, when the library has the copyright of the material, the reproduction for private use is provided usually free with a credit to the source or otherwise mostly under fair use provisions and the commercial reproduction needs written permission from and fees paid to the library. Finally, we extract the common practice on access and reproduction policies and we map the conventional to digital policies.