PERMISSIONS & COPYRIGHT

Warning Concerning Copyright Restrictions

The Beinecke's Digital Images Online Database contains many thousands of digital images of rare and unique material including photographs, works of art, printed items, and manuscripts from the library's holdings. These digital images may be freely downloaded for personal, research, and study purposes only.

Permission to examine manuscripts or sale of a photoduplication is not an authorization to publish. If the text or image in question is under copyright, permission to publish for commercial gain should be sought from the owners of the rights, typically the creator or the heirs to his or her estate. The Library may be able to assist in identifying the copyright holders. It is not necessary to seek the Library's permission to publish texts or images (unless the University is identified as the copyright holder.) The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library should, however, be cited as the source with the appropriate credit line.

There are two websites that will be very helpful to researchers who are tracing copyright holders. The Beinecke Library contributes contact information about copyright holders for material in its collection to the WATCH file.

WATCH File: The WATCH File (Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders) is a database containing primarily the names and addresses of copyright holders or contact persons for authors and artists whose archives are housed, in whole or in part, in libraries and archives in North America and the United Kingdom. The objective in making the database available is to provide information to scholars about whom to contact for permission to publish text and images that still enjoy copyright protection. WATCH is a joint project of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Reading Library, Reading, England.

U.S. Copyright Office: Includes all the information you need to know to comply with copyright law. A searchable database of records can help you determine if a work is protected by copyright.

CREDIT LINES

Orbis records, records in the Database for Archival Collections and Manuscripts, and Digital Images Online records contain the appropriate credit lines for manuscripts and archival collections. Even if the Beinecke Library is not the copyright holder, it is still necessary to cite the Library as the owner of the original material. The various collections in the Beinecke Library should be cited as:

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Yale Collection of German Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Frederick R. Koch Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University .

Contact: Beinecke.Library@yale.edu or the appropriate Curator if you are unsure which credit line is appropriate.