University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Legal Considerations in the Dissemination of Licensed Digital Spatial Data

Day, Patti; Maene, Chieko

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/3679

Description

Title
Legal Considerations in the Dissemination of Licensed Digital Spatial Data
Author(s)
  • Day, Patti
  • Maene, Chieko
Issue Date
2006
Keyword(s)
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
  • Licensed resources
Abstract
State and local governments increasingly license digital spatial data, the dissemination of which by academic libraries requires specific legal and operational considerations to reconcile license conditions with public access. We examined this in the context of the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL) at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee during 2000-05. Wisconsin open records law protects the right of access to public records, and geographic data is intended to be in the public domain. Despite this, Wisconsin counties have dramatically increased their use of licenses for geographic data, and the use of these licenses has never been challenged under Wisconsin open records law. The AGSL negotiates existing licenses, conveying to users the licensing conditions and reassuring the data producers. We developed user sublicenses including copyright statements, original licensor’s names, and signed user agreements to the terms of the original licenses. Each user agreed that failure to comply with these terms would result in disciplinary action. For security reasons, all licensed data were delivered on CD-ROMs, which incorporated the licensing information, forced users to sign the sublicense, and insured discussion of the licensing issues. To insure consistency, we developed policies and procedures to be followed for each type of data request. We also provided to faculty members and students instruction sessions dealing with data availability and acquisition.
Publisher
Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3679
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2006 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 55 (2) Fall 2006: Geographic Information Systems and Libraries PRIMARY
Library Trends 55 (2) Fall 2006: Geographic Information Systems and Libraries. Edited by Jaime Stoltenberg and Abraham Parrish.