Hello,
I work at a small history museum in Florida in an area with a very rich depth of local music history. I have recently been approached by someone with an extensive collection of music (records, cassettes, and CDs) that he wants to work with us to share. His stated goal is to create a digitized archive of the music that includes biographical information about the artists and bands, scans of the album artwork, and the actual songs themselves. I think this would be a fantastic resource that our community would enjoy, but it makes me very nervous for the copyright implications. My initial instinct would be to choose perhaps one or two songs per album and include brief clips, rather than the full track to try and keep this within fair use. We also discussed leaving out the audio entirely and including only the biographical information and album covers as a path of less resistance, but we would love to share some of the music as well.
I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has worked with music collections or can point me in the direction of organizations that have undertaken similar projects in the past. This is a real passion project for the collector and he is generously offering to do the bulk of the work himself; he is mainly looking to the museum as a place to host the product he is creating. I want to work with him to make this happen as much as we can while staying within the legal boundaries.
Thank you!
-Kaitlyn
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Kaitlyn Hof-Mahoney
Curator of Collections
Matheson History Museum Inc.
Gainesville FL
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