In the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University, a task force has been formed to develop policies and procedures for digitizing and then returning materials to donors who do not wish to part with their items at present. Sometimes called "digitize-and-return" or "scan-and-return" projects, this is a form of “post-custodial” digitization, an area that most in the archival field acknowledge has a lot of allure, but many outstanding questions of legal risk plague willing participants. The literature on digitize-and-return projects is fairly fragmented; everyone seems to be either patently ignoring or wringing their hands at the thorny, practical issues inherent to these types of projects. That being said, we see several paths available to institutions in the area of rights management. We propose to present less of a finished project, and more of the onramp to a project—the deliberations, research, and outstanding dilemmas we encounter, that may or may not allow us to implement a post-custodial workflow at our institution. We seek to highlight the ownership and rights options available to all institutions, and the challenges these pose to both institutions and donors, in order to further the small but important national conversation around post-custodial digitization.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/3249/
