Hello Margaret,

 

I am the solo librarian in a very small  library.

With the help of some volunteers, I have been working on the migration from VHS to DVD format for the past two years or so. (There were approximately  500 tapes in the collection.)

 

One volunteer tracks down commercially (or not commercially) available DVDs or, when DVDs are not available in any way, he tries to track down the rightsholders in order to ask them permission to copy their programs to DVD (just in case.) This is a very time consuming process. I enter the permissions into a database and keep a copy of the permission with the DVD.

 

A publication that has been really helpful  to make decisions in regards to various issues that came up while working on this project, has been the 'Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries'. Published in January 2012 by the ARL. On page 18, under the heading "Limitations", it says for example:

 

-Libraries should not provide access to or circulate original and preservation copies simultaneously.

 

and:

 

-Off-premises access to preservation copies circulated as substitutes for original copies should be limited to authenticated members of a library's patron community, e.g., students, faculty, staff, affiliated scholars, and other  accredited users.

 

 

I hope this helps.

 

Kitty

 

 

 

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

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207-859-5662

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