The following is a guest post by Stephanie Lewin-Lane, Music Library coordinator at the University of Houston Libraries. This week, we’ll feature posts by members of the UH Libraries Copyright Team highlighting Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week 2018.

The Great 78 Project | Internet Archive

Boston Public Library (BPL) recently announced plans to digitize and make available over 200,000 recordings of their Sound Archives Collection through a partnership with the Internet Archive. Many of BPL’s recordings are on historical formats, such as vinyl LPs or shellac-based 78s, so the impetus for the project is preservation.

It is fair use for libraries to create a preservation copy of at-risk materials, but streaming content has been a bit more problematic due to copyright protections. However, more examples of making streaming content available online are cropping up in recent years citing fair use due to the educational nature of the hard-to-find content. In fact, the Library of Congress has a web page that discusses fair use and preservation with a helpful list of links and examples on the subject.