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RE: Copyright in Bibliographic records? 

HI, I'm not a cataloguer, but am a citation database producer, and we
certainly believe our records are copyright.  Apart from the intellectual
effort of selecting material for indexing, we put quite a bit of
intellectual effort into assigning subject headings to each record, and in
one database, writing abstracts - so the basic bibliographic info has
considerable value added by the work we do.  Where we use original
abstracts, we respect the right of the publisher to the copyright in those
abstracts, and only use them if we have written permission, and anyone
wanting to make use of the records for any vaguely commercial reason is
advised that although we have the copyright in the database, we do not
hold copyright (and hence cannot give permissions) for abstracts we have
not written ourselves.  This is entirely consistent with the attitude of
the National Library of Medicine re MEDLINE records.  We intend to add a
small subset of MEDLINE to one of our databases - and have the necessary
permissions from NLM for inclusion of the records, but have to approach
the journal publishers for permission to include the original abstracts. 

Sandra Henderson
Manager
National Bibliographic Publications
National Library of Australia


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