We've worked with three different commercial
publishers who digitized our newspapers this way over the last two
years. Michael Edmonds would be happy to talk with
anybody who calls. It's too long a story to be typed out.

Michael Edmonds
Head, Digital Collections & Web Services
Library-Archives Division
Wisconsin Historical Society
608-264-6538

Posted on behalf of Michael Edmonds by Maija Salo Cravens
Head, Cataloging and Collections Management
Library-Archives Division
Wisconsin Historical Society

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum on behalf of Seth Smith
Sent: Tue 7/3/2007 9:21 AM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [SERIALST] Digitization requests from newspaper publishers

I work at one of the largest and most comprehensive state newspaper
repositories in the country.  We are starting to get requests from
conglomerate publishers who want to digitize their titles (going back into the
mid-1800s) from microfilm negatives that we filmed in-house over the years
and which we store and own.

Our relationships with publishers has always been excellent--we recieve free
copies of newspapers to microfilm.  However, the enormous amount of staff
time and money involved in duplicatiing the negatives for digitization, as well
as microfilm ownership rights seem like they must be addressed on some level.
We are hoping to get an "institutional membership" for these digital archives
for which our members and patrons can access either remotely or in-house to
offset some of our costs.

I'm sure other newspaper archives and serials librarians are running into similar
situations. Can anyone offer some helpful suggestions on this?