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]

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