Greetings, I saw the announcement concerning the MCN conference (October 27-30, 1999: Philadelphia) on the Humanist list. I attended a conference of scholars working in Ancient Near Eastern studies this past weekend in Chicago and the general sentiment was that most scholars cannot make useful images of texts and artifacts freely available due to restrictions from museums and other repositories. Most of the texts in question would be held on cuneiform tablets or papyri and could hardly be considered to be of any commercial value for advertising (as opposed to photos of a famous person).
Since your organization obviously supports the use of technology by museums I may be directing my question to the wrong group but I am curious what reasons (if anyone knows) curators use to justify to themselves (if no one else) prohibitions on freely distributing scholarly quality photos of obviously non-commercial materials. I would also appreciate any insight list members can give on the question of how to go about changing policies that restrict such reproductions. Patrick -- Patrick Durusau Information Technology Services Scholars Press [email protected] Manager, ITS
