To me, the question of ownership is less important than what, exactly, you'd be selling. If I understand cataloging correctly (assuming these are books rather than MS collections), your catalogers have collected information that anybody with a lot of free time could, conceivably, have collected. I.e., anyone could sit there with the books and take down author, title, pub date, etc. and collect it. So I figure what you'd really be selling, should you charge the guy for it, is the labor and technical expertise it took to collect all that information in a single place and make it available to the general public. The information itself doesn't belong to you any more than it would to someone just opening the book off the shelf. In a similar vein, I don't think OCLC "owns" the information they may sell to members, they're only saving the purchaser the time & effort of collecting it. If you feel that the work put in is worth money, and your institution has no policy against selling that work to someone else, I guess you could offer to sell him the records. DS ______________________________________ Daniel Sokolow, Archives Coordinator David Taylor Archives North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System 155 Community Drive Great Neck, NY 11021 mailto:[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]>