Here's an interesting question that's come down from our Reference Department: ***The requestor would like to select some bibliographic records from our online catalog and reproduce them in a union catalog of genealogical books and manuscripts. He could possibly download quite a few - in 1999 he published the Genealogical Library Master Catalog with 300,000 bibliographic records on 3 CD-ROMs, which was picked by Library Journal as one of the best 10 CD-ROMs for that year. Maybe his conscience is bothering him? I don't know that we can stop him, but I do wonder who owns our records?*** Seems to me that, by being publicly available, our catalog records are, in a sense, in the public domain, and that downloading them is just the modern substitute for transcribing the information by hand (which anyone would be perfectly free to do). The intended product being a union catalog, the matter of proper credit would not seem to be an issue, and an explicit blessing of this use could also be accompanied by an explicit request not to alter any data. I would be interested in others' perspectives. Lydia Lucas Head, Processing Department Minnesota Historical Society 345 Kellogg Boulevard West St. Paul, MN 55102-1906 ph (651) 297-5542 fax (651) 296-9961 e-mail: [log in to unmask] A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List! To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>