Looking for legal advice (yikes!)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

Dear Collective Wisdom,

Can anyone help me resolve the following situation, as currently faced by
a colleague here at my institution?:

"The Basque Studies Library has been funded by the NEH to create an open
web (free) database of nearly 30,000 journal articles [citations,
actually], from 1995 onwards, pertaining to Basque Studies.  I am finding
that in order to export more than 10 citations at a time from online
journal databases such as [examples], the database requires me to register
and log in. When I register, I am forced to accept their "Terms &
Conditions" stating that I will not share, display or reproduce this
information, and that the export of data is for personal use.  Gathering
the citation data in groups of 10 is too time consuming, given our
deadline of Summer 2005."

Here are the questions:

1.  The final product of this project will be an online bibliography;
there will be links to full text where we have online access, but the
links will take a user through our authentication program, limiting access
to authorized users.  Thus, the only content that will be shared with the
general public is the citations.  Are bibliographic citations
copyrightable?

2.  If they are (and I suspect that they may be, at least as large,
integrated chunks of data from a proprietary database), are the terms of a
click-through license binding in a non-UCITA state?

My initial inclination is to think that as long as we're just compiling a
specialized bibliography and not creating a competing commercial database,
we can probably download citations at will.  The problem is that the
click-through license requires my colleague to agree not to use them the
way she needs to.  But given that the license is only a contract of
adhesion, I'm not sure how much we need to pay attention to it.

Thoughts?

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu