This is for Seth Smith (and anyone else who might be interested).

I suggest that before you do anything you should read an article from
Popular Mechanics called "The digital ice age" - not scientific but to
my mind a must. You can reach it by going to Google and searching for
"digital ice age". It should be the first hit.

Good luck,

Pamela Ben-Eliezer
Shaare Zedek Medical Library
Jerusalem, Israel

-----Original Message-----
From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum
[mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Seth Smith
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 5:21 PM
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?
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