Hi, all,

I've been emailing back and forth with Judy Nokes, the Information Policy Adviser at The National Archives in the UK.  We have a number of map sets we wanted to scan and I was asking for permission to do so for research purposes, assuming they were in copyright.  Here's what Judy has to say about it.

"If the maps are Crown copyright and have been published, then anything you have which is dated prior to the end of 1965 will now be out of copyright.  As I said before, you don't have to, but we would appreciate that the source of the maps is duly acknowledged."
And
"To explain, Crown copyright lasts for 50 years from the end of the year in which material was first published, as referred to in section 163 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988."

Note in the second sentence she states that is "50 years from the end of the year in which material was first published."  This means that a set such as a Kenya 1:50,000 set that was started in 1957 but not completed until, say, 1975 is fair game for the whole set.

We are now going through all of our maps to find Crown Copyright maps with a start date prior to the end of 1965 to scan.  Judy stated that I no longer need to ask permission for each set, it is granted by their laws.

Here is the license as an FYI.
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/<http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/>

I hope this is helpful to those of you scanning maps from your collections.  As we get ours scanned, we'll create index map shapefiles and add to Chris Thiry's site.

Best,

Julie

****
Julie Sweetkind-Singer
Assistant Director of Geospatial, Cartographic and Scientific Data
Head Librarian, Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collections
397 Panama Mall, MC: 2211
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-1102