Workshop on Electronic Texts · Library of Congress
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Marybeth PETERS reviewed copyright law in the United States and offered advice during a lively discussion of this subject. But uncertainty remains concerning the price of copyright in a digital medium, because a solution remains to be worked out concerning management and synthesis of copyrighted and out-of-copyright pieces of a database. As moderator of the final session of the Workshop, Prosser GIFFORD directed discussion to future courses of action and the potential role of LC in advancing them. Among the recommendations that emerged were the following: * Workshop participants should 1) begin to think about working with image material, but structure and digitize it in such a way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and 2) find a common way to build text and images together so that they can be used jointly at some stage in the future, with appropriate network support, because that is how users will want to access these materials. The Library might encourage attempts to bring together people who are working on texts and images. * A network version of American Memory should be developed or consideration should be given to making the data in it available to people interested in doing network multimedia. Given the current dearth of digital data that is appealing and unencumbered by extremely complex rights problems, developing a network version of American Memory could do much to help make network multimedia a reality.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.