Who counts as a user?
Everyone employed by the institution and everyone enrolled on a course,
including part-time and distance students, and anyone teaching your students
under contract. For a college, library or museum it also covers members of the
public using the collection on your premises. It does not cover alumni or the
general public off-site.
Can a student put one of these in a thesis that goes online?
Yes. A completed thesis can be deposited in your institutional repository,
including an open repository, with the credit shown. Most image licences refuse
this and it causes real difficulty at submission, so it is granted here rather
than left to be argued about.
What resolution do we get?
Full archive resolution, the same file a publisher or a broadcaster buys —
no crops, no downsampling, no watermark. There is no reduced education version
and nothing is held back for a higher tier. A map sheet can be printed at wall
size; a photograph will take a full page at print quality with room to
spare.
What happens when the subscription ends?
Access to the archive stops. Anything already made with it — essays,
theses, articles, printed course packs — can be kept and used without
limit, permanently. Files held on a learning platform should be removed within
sixty days, unless they are part of a student's completed submission.
Is there a limit on downloads?
No. A department can download an entire collection on day one.
We are one school in a trust. Can the trust buy it for all of us?
Yes, and it is cheaper per school. One agreement, one invoice, every school in
the trust covered. It can also be bought school by school if that suits your
budgets better.
Does the archive keep growing?
Yes, and everything added during your year is included at no extra charge. The
holdings run to more than eighty thousand photographs and maps and over three
thousand documents, and collections are catalogued and published in turn. Nothing
goes up until it is catalogued to the same standard: a written caption, researched
keywords, a date where the document carries one, and a citable reference.
Can we get a collection that is not published yet?
Ask. The holdings are far larger than the published catalogue and the cataloguing
order is not fixed. Subscribers get first call on it, so if you need the North
Africa maps for a module starting in January, that is a reason to catalogue them
next.
Some of this material is difficult. How is it handled?
The collections include photographs of prisoners, of the dead, of the ghettos and
of the propaganda apparatus of a dictatorship. They are reproduced with their
original captions and without editorialising, because that is what an archive is
for. Teachers know their own classes; the catalogue describes what an item shows
so the decision can be made before it is on the screen.
