Dear Lucinda:

I have to respond when someone is kind enough to read (and cite) one of my publications.

Assuming that your sheet music is in the public domain, you cannot use copyright to control what people do with it.  You can if you like create a contract with the user.  This contract would say that you would provide him/her copies of the public domain sheet music so long as he/she does not digitize it, publish it, or further distribute it without your permission and without payment of a publishing fee.  This is similar to saying to the researcher that you will loan him/her your car, but that it has to be returned with a full tank of gas.  As the owner of the sheet music, you are able to set any conditions you want on its use.  Of course, you also have to be willing to bring legal action against any user who chooses to ignore your contract terms.

(Caveat: there are competing legal doctrines at work here, but by and large what I describe above is how most people work.)

Assuming that you can control reproductions with contracts, the next question is should you do this.  There is a growing chorus that says that archives that try to exert control over public domain work are engaging in "copyfraud."  See, for example, the recent article by Joseph Mazzone with the same title that faults archives for doing this.  A better analysis is Ken Hamma's thoughtful piece "Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility" in the November, 2005 issue of D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html.  Hamma argues that our entire culture will be the richer if public domain material is freely available.  Although "public domain art" is in the title, there is much in the piece that would be of interest to archivists.

Peter

PS: I have mentioned this before, but Yale has an excellent site on the difference between the rights of the physical owner and the rights of the copyright owner.  See http://www.library.yale.edu/special_collections/copyright.html.
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Peter B. Hirtle                      
Chair, SAA IP Working Group
IRIS Technology Strategist and
  CUL Intellectual Property Officer
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