Using a digital camera to retain images of record book pages

[Paddy Casey]

Sharon Carberry just flagged an interesting article on the use of a digital camera to retain images of record book pages (see http://www.ourlibrary.ca/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=662 ).

I have long been using a digital camera for this purpose and have found it to be invaluable for copying articles from the Clare newspapers in the Local Studies Centre in Ennis. The newspapers are bound in enormous tomes and a morning spent wrestling those tomes onto the photocopier can give you a hernia with a rotator cuff syndrome and a vertebral compression fracture thrown in. Snapping with the camera is much easier.

In both the National Archives and the National Library in Dublin I was told that it was forbidden to take photos of documents but no-one could give me a convincing explanation for this rule. Whilst I could understand that they should be worried about a modern book being photographed in case copyright were to be infringed I couldn't see why an 1822 application for an eviction order should not be copied in this way. One archivist told me that the photoflash damages the paper but I couldn't find any scientific evidence that this is the case (see also http://206.180.235.130/byform/mailing-l ... 00075.html and http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... flash.html ).

Has anyone else in this forum had difficulty getting permission to photograph records in an archive holding Clare material ?

Paddy