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Padfield, Tim --- "Preserving and Accessing our Cultural Heritage – Issues for Cultural Sector Institutions: Archives, Libraries, Museums and Galleries" [2010] ELECD 793; in Derclaye, Estelle (ed), "Copyright and Cultural Heritage" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Copyright and Cultural Heritage

Editor(s): Derclaye, Estelle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849800044

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Preserving and Accessing our Cultural Heritage – Issues for Cultural Sector Institutions: Archives, Libraries, Museums and Galleries

Author(s): Padfield, Tim

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

9. Preserving and accessing our
cultural heritage ­ issues for
cultural sector institutions: archives,
libraries, museums and galleries
Tim Padfield*

Cultural sector institutions, such as archives, libraries, museums and gal-
leries, are the middlemen of the cultural world. They are not, on the whole,
creators of original materials. Instead they take in and preserve the works
produced by others. Those works might be original, creative materials by
such people as novelists, scientists, photographers, painters, cartographers
and poets or the everyday products and tools of people's working and
leisure lives, such as business correspondence, accounts, farm machinery
and children's toys. Most of these materials are protected by copyright
in one way or another. At the same time, these materials are kept and
preserved for the primary purpose of making them accessible to others to
enjoy, to study and to use to create still more new work.
In copyright terms, too, the cultural sector institutions are, at least in
some respects, middlemen. They are not for the most part the creators, the
`authors', of the materials in their care and so are not usually the owners of
the copyright in them. They are also not the primary users of those materi-
als and do not need the permission of rights owners to carry out most of
their basic duties. For these reasons, in a position outside the ranks of both
rights owners and users, they aspire to be recognized as trusted interme-
diaries, able to mediate between interests that are frequently ...