Intellectual property and privacy

Whilst the majority of the items within your digital collection will have been created by yourself it is conceivable that some material (published or not) will have been created by others and has been passed to you either via email (and subsequently saved) or via download from the internet or other digital means. Such material will be the copyright of the creator and will have limitations as to what you, and the archivist curating your collection, can do with it.

It is also highly likely that your digital collection will contain personal information about individuals other than yourself. Such material may be subject to the Data Protection Act and when passed to an archive will need to be treated accordingly.

Our tips below will help you ensure the archivist handling your collection is aware of legislative issues relating to your collection:

• Be aware if you are downloading and storing material created by others.
• Be prepared to make the archivist aware of the presence of any third party copyrighted material, and if known, who owns the copyright.
• Avoid using Digital Rights Management tools or functionality to your own copyright material if you intent to donate it to an archive. Such tools or functions (such as those present in Adobe file formats) cannot be removed easily by archivists. This can limit the usability of the files and inhibit future research.
• Any files you have created will be covered by copyright. If you don't wish to transfer copyright to the University, you may consider applying Creative Commons licenses to your files to relax the restrictions and enable greater usage of your collection, whilst under the custody of the University. You should let the archivist know if you have used such licenses for your digital files.
• If you think you may have personal or sensitive information about other individuals, particularly if they may still be living, it would be helpful if you could alert the archivist prior to transferring your digital collection to the archive.