Legal Considerations in the Dissemination of Licensed Digital Spatial Data

State and local governments increasingly license digital spatial data, the dissemination of which by academic libraries requires specific legal and operational considerations to reconcile license conditions with public access. We examined this in the context of the American Geographical Society Library (AGSL) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during 2000-05. Wisconsin open records law protects the right of access to public records, and geographic data is intended to be in the public domain. Despite this, Wisconsin counties have dramatically increased their use of licenses for geographic data, and the use of these licenses has never been challenged under Wisconsin open records law. The AGSL negotiates existing licenses, conveying to users the licensing conditions and reassuring the data producers. We developed user sublicenses including copyright statements, original licensor's names, and signed user agreements to the terms of the original licenses. Each user agreed that failure to comply with these terms would result in disciplinary action. For security reasons, all licensed data were delivered on CD-ROMs, which incorporated the licensing information, forced users to sign the sublicense, and insured discussion of the licensing issues. To insure consistency, we developed policies and procedures to be followed for each type of data request. We also provided to faculty members and students instruction sessions dealing with data availability and acquisition.