MinDocDigPro

The Minnstf Document Digitization Project

This project has two major goals:

1. Preserve MNstf documents via digitization.
2. Make MNstf documents widely available on the web.

There are two major challenges:

1. Actually doing all the scanning
2. Securing permission from copyright holders who contributed to the documents

And one minor challenge: Putting the documents up on the web in a reasonably organized and pleasing way.

Copyright

Most people who have contributed to MNstf publications probably did not intend to hold copyright on their contributions. However, some certainly did and we need to be careful about this. The Minnstf board in 2008 came up with clear guidelines on how to handle copyright for Mnstf (including Minicon) publications:

• Images credited to an artist require us to ask the artist for permission to republish (including web posting)
• Text credited to someone, ditto.
• Anything not credited is assumed to be property of Minn-stf. We will, in general, put this up on the web with some sort of permissive license.

In decreasing order of preference, we'd like copyright holders to:

1. Grant Minn-stf all rights to their works. This is best because then the work becomes Mnstf's and we can do whatever we want with it.
2. Grant Minn-stf the right to make their works available via some sort of permissive license, such as those from Creative Commons. In this case, we need to know which sorts of restrictions the copyright holder is interested in, such as:
   • Requiring that the work cannot be used commercially
   • Requiring that the work cannot be modified
   • Requiring that attribution always be given when the work is shown
3. Grant Minn-stf the right to display their works on the web while retaining full copyright restrictions.