Managing the contents of Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) Archives - Copyright Issues

Abstract

Archives and museums all over the world face challenges in facilitating the access to their contents and also protecting the rights of the author, more so, in the case of unpublished works. At the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), the archive was set up two years back comprising of all the archivalmaterial in various forms available within the Institute. Since IIA is more than 220 years old the collection includesmore than 5000 items in various formats which are of historical importance and environmentallysensitive. While the contents of many of the archival materials are available in digital form, and accessible from our open access repository, still there are some contents which are not digitized as we feel they need to be scrutinized for copyright compliance. Also there are issues concerning the use of contents in physical form available in the archives, such as fair use, transfer of ownership, ownership rights, exclusive rights and especially the copyright provisions for published and unpublished works etc. need to be addressed keeping in mind the existing archival policy. Since we intend that the IIA archival material will be used purely for academic and research purposes, we are in the process of designing our own guidelines as the Indian Copyright Act is inadequate to address these issues. In this paper we have discussed some of the challenges faced by the IIA archives with reference to the use of both physical and digital contents and the attempts made to keep the balance of providing access and not infringing the copyright laws.