"Can I Use This?"

"Can I Use This?" is the title of an interesting opinion piece by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker on the provision of digital images in museums. Their perhaps controversial suggestion was that the majority of museums and libraries who do not provide such materials free of charge are "undermining" education. Although this focused on provision in the specific discipline of art history, curators and librarians in many other disciplines are having to decide how to approach these issues.

This paper provoked a lively discussion at Cambridge University librarians' "brown bag lunch" in June, which I attended, as before bringing chocolate tiffin to cement my status as an honorary librarian for an hour or so. Several of the genuine librarians present have begun providing images as a service for readers, and none has completely solved the dilemma of whether (and if so how) to charge for them. Charging for commercial but not for academic or research use - as Aidan Baker does at the Haddon - is a common approach, but it is not the only one. One participant mentioned an instance of a Cambridge graduate student being charged to use an image generated in and held by a Cambridge University library in her thesis. And even with a policy of charging for commercial use only, it is not always easy to distinguish between the two.

And this - as well as the prospect of a lunch including tiffin - is the question that has woken Ursula from her particularly long winter torpor. I am currently editing a textbook, Computational Biomedicine, which is due to be published next year by Oxford University Press. This book will include a large number of images and other diagrams - some directly provided by our chapter contributors and others taken from published papers and reviews - and each has to be checked for copyright. I and my colleagues are in the same position as a user seeking permission to reproduce digital images from books in an academic library: and how does one classify a textbook, which is to be sold for profit but for educational purposes: commercial or academic? (Aidan thought that the Haddon would probably treat such a user as a bona fide academic.)

The Haddon Library web pages host several collections of images taken from its older books. Among these is a series of images made from sketches of Australia made in the mid-nineteenth century by the German humanist and explorer William Blandowski. The most popular of all the images in this archive is no. 41, which includes - in the background - what may be the first artistic depiction of football played by "Australia rules". Aidan charges all but academic users on a sliding scale for high resolution copies of these images, which produces a trickle of funds for the library, but almost every request causes questions like those described above.

The complete Haddon image collection (currently comprising 501 images) is held in the University's Dspace archive, "the institutional repository of the University of Cambridge". Individuals and groups attached to the university may deposit there any digital content that is their own and of a "scholarly or heritage" nature. The archive, therefore, includes an enormous variety of material besides images: the archives are broken down into categories including books, audio and video files, software and maps. All material stored there must be freely accessible, at least in some form.

These few examples illustrate just how confusing the situation can seem for any potential user of images held at Cambridge University. Once you have located and selected a useful image, it can be quite difficult to find out who owns it, how it can be used, and time consuming to bat emails backwards and forwards requesting permissions. Creative Commons provides one solution to this problem. Anyone who creates an image can choose to set out their and others' rights in it using one of a range of "creative commons licenses". There are six to choose from ranging from "CC-BY", which allows any user to do anything they like with the material, for whatever purpose, as long as the author is credited, to the most restrictive, "CC-BY-NC-ND" which forbids commercial use or any change to the original material. It is becoming more and more popular, and rightly so.

And yet - even if we could somehow get to a digital utopia in which all "scholarly material" (however defined) could be accessed and shared at will, for no matter what (legal) purpose, might there not still be something missing? And might that not be, in one participant's elegant phrase, "the physicality of the book"? Certainly, e-books have not taken over from physical books to the extent that seemed likely just a few years ago. People still like to see and to interact with physical objects. Visits to museums and art galleries are still popular, and paper books are still being sold. (It has to be added that some people have taken the desire to possess books to the most undesirable of extremes...)

And it is still possible to have the best of both worlds. There are still places where physical books can be shared freely. Support your local public library!