Hello Oracle.
I’m on a group at Colby looking at all the various issues surfacing with VHS and DVD collections, lending, and format migration. Some of our rare, out of print, and important VHS are deteriorating and we want to migrate to another format to preserve them for continued curricular use. None of these are commercially available. These VHS normally circulated on and off campus and were in our open stacks.
We are planning to migrate these VHS to DVD for preservation. Many questions arose, with differing opinions, etc.
1) We are assuming we need to retain the original VHS in storage, as proof of ownership of the original DVD. Is this a correct assumption?
2) One of the librarians indicated that we would not be able to / or should not lend the videos once they were migrated to DVD because of copyright. Is this a correct assertion based on copyright? (Or just cautionary outlook) . Various lending scenarios were debated. For example, it was assumed we could lend to on-campus users. However, disagreement arose about lending within various consortia and local lending partners, and also interlibrary loan)
Any advice or illumination would be welcomed.
Please contact me directly at:
Margaret Ericson, Art and Music Librarian, Colby College
207-859-5662