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Sir Arthur Sullivan's manuscript (full) score of his last Savoy Opera (The Grand Duke) is held by Piedpoint Morgan in NYC. I contacted them about getting a digitised copy. There answer, firmly was, "no".

Considering this music is now in the public domain, where to 'institutions' stand on the purchase of works that are now public domain?

So, any enlightment would be greatly appreciated.

I have no idea why the Morgan library would take such a stance apart from the mystical super-copyright for music (which is apparently perpetual) that some libraries appear to believe in as an article of faith. There is some validity to the argument that the process of scanning such material can damage it, though this is not really the case with the high-level planetary scanners now used which require no extra lighting.

Not all libraries have that type of scanner. A week or so ago, I asked Sibley (who has been very generous with digitizing) to digitize something in their collection, and got a very gracious response, but the bottom line was that it was too fragile, and though they would like to buy that type of scanner sometime in the future, they don't have one now. So it can't be digitized.

On the other hand, if that were Morgan's reason, I would imagine they would say so, so I think they probably believe in super copyright . . . .

Instead of a scanner for delicate items, what about using a good digital camera (with good lighting)?

Not ideal, but in a pinch, maybe?

Thank you one and all for your responses, at least it clarified one thing: if a manuscript is fragile, scanning can cause damage.

I guess a one of scan ensures that a fragile piece of paper will last forever, paper does not. So I don't really see the problem IF the MS is really old (hundreds of years).

I guess I'll just have to live in hope that it surfaces its head soon.

I certainly cannot speak for the Morgan (or any other library), but several issues can go into our digitizing decisions. Fragility of the item (or, more usually, its binding in the case of materials in our Special Collections) is certainly one of them. While we do not own a top-down scanner like a Kirtas, we can sometimes outsource this kind of scanning. Of course, costs are then incurred, and we would ask the requestor to pay those costs up front it they wanted the scan (and occasionally they do--it's not cheap, though). This is the same model that libraries and archives have used for decades when creating microfilms of items.

Another consideration, especially for us as we have been absorbing most of the costs of digitization ourselves, is simply how labor intensive will a project be. If it's several hundred pages--like an opera score can be--even if it's safe to flatbed we will generally turn down those requests. We simply don't have the manpower available to devote to a single item like that.

A couple of other points: manuscripts are subject to longer copyright duration than published material. I don't know that this is the case with this Sullivan MS, but it's true for many pre-1923 works. Also in the case of manuscript works, depending on how an archive acquired the item, there may be agreements between a donor and institution that preclude the archive making the works available, or only under certain circumstances.

Lastly, it's worth noting that, generally speaking, paper that is very, very old is usually better than more recent paper. Paper from the last quarter of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th is particularly prone to acidic reaction. We've had a program here for a couple of years now looking at scores and books published in the last couple of decades, determining the acidity of the paper, and where necessary sending them out for commercial deacidification before they turn brown.

Actually, a manuscript like that of the Sullivan work mentioned is not subject to any different term due to the fact that the work was actually published back in the 1890s (the general rule on publication is that when any version of a given work is published, all extant versions by the composer or created for the composer by others as works made for hire - like the vocal scores for most G & S operettas - are considered published at the same time). Even for genuinely unpublished works, the term of protection is only life plus 70 in the USA. Everything unpublished by authors dead over 70 years entered the US public domain on January 1, 2003. Works of such authors first published between 1978 and 2002 are protected until the end of 2048. So, even if one made the extremely dubious argument that the Sullivan full score was somehow unpublished (even though the vocal score and instrumental parts were unambiguously published long ago), it entered the US public domain on 1/1/2003. Canada has some fairly strict rules in play for what qualifies as "unpublished" for authors dead over 50 years: the work must not have been performed in public or recorded in the composer's lifetime in order to qualify for the 50-year term of protection from first publication. A few European countries have similar rules in order to prevent the confusion and litigation that often arises about who should have the rights for works of long-dead authors with no apparent hiers. (Amazing how many alleged descendants materialize appear if something makes a big splash!)

None of the above, of course, has anything to do with what can be a fair number (Thanks, Jim) of perfectly logical reasons for libraries not reproducing manuscripts or similar rare material. As scanning technology improves (and becomes less potentially destructive), it should be possible to make more things available.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't have time to look up all the vagaries, I just knew there were different rules for unpublished material.

Thanks to one and all for their input into this thread, which opened a whole new world of insite into the workings of libraries who have rare manuscripts in their possession.

I the "fragile" argument a little hard to swallow as digitizing, whilst expensive in both time and hardware, ensures that the mss is not touched again. Just my thoughts on this, I might be wrong (often am).

Thanks especially to jmfarrington for his/her words of wisdom.