Raising Money Raises Questions: The Ethics of Generating Revenue from Archival Materials

Abstract

Although archives have frequently been associated with treasure troves or viewed as stores of cultural gems, those responsible for maintaining them know that their operation and care can cost as much as a king's ransom. Funding archival work has perennially been a difficult issue to address. Recessions exacerbate financial problems, and, as the current economic downturn has shown, bring budgetary concerns to the forefront. During tough times archives and other cultural institutions have turned to their own collections, deaccessioning and selling valuable items to cover operating costs; such moves, however, often raise public ire and generate negative publicity for the institution. Some archives have chosen instead to follow in the footsteps of museums and raise funds by mining their holdings for materials that they can license, particularly those dealing in new forms of media based on the repackaging of existing content (Loe, 2004, p. 58). Although not as controversial as deaccessioning, archives must still contend with a multitude of legal and ethical issues when using items in their collections to generate revenue.Charging Fees or Generating RevenueAs with other predominantly cultural institutions like libraries and museums, archives have traditionally been viewed as nonprofit organizations intended to serve the greater good of society and scholarship. Their willingness to share the information they hold supported an intellectual barter system in which scholars could use archival materials in their works in return for acknowledging the source and depositing a copy of the final product. Permissions fees were usually charged only when materials were used in commercial or profit-seeking ventures. Changes in program funding, however, made it necessary for institutions to develop other ways of supporting their normal activities (Browar, Henderson, North, & Wenger, 2002, pp. 124-25). The introduction of fees for services like copying served a double purpose, helping both to recoup the cost of such activities and to moderate requests that could be potentially damaging to materials (Blais, 1995, p. 50). Advances in digital media also spurred archives to think of their holdings as potential sources of revenue. Through Corbis Corporation, Bill Gates illustrates how profitable fine art and archival images could be when they are digitized and actively marketed (Butler, 1998, p. 65); greater numbers of requests on the part of documentary filmmakers and others drawing upon the past for their creative works demonstrated that "the growing global demand for media content has also increased the perceived value of iconic cultural assets" like those lining many institutions' shelves (Ivey, 2008, p. 33). Realizing the potential of their holdings as well as the possibility that commercial companies could exploit their materials if they do not, many archives have decided to implement their own revenue generation programs.Some distinction must be made, however, between the types of fees archives generally charge. Gabrielle Blais notes that the Canadian National Archives follows the government in distinguishing between charging user fees tailored toward "the recovery of a fair share of the cost of providing goods and services from those who receive a direct benefit from them" and implementing "new activities which could be undertaken ... with the intention of generating revenue" and that "are not undertaken strictly because of their archival nature" (Blais, 1995, p. 50). Simon Fowler elaborates on the latter in his essay on funding projects in British record offices:Income generation by archives might be defined as those activities organized by archival staff with the aim of raising revenue for the benefit of the record office.... What unites these ventures is that they more efficiently exploit resources present already, such as staff knowledge or the records themselves. Revenue raising activities increasingly provide new services which might not exist otherwise (Fowler, 1993, p. …