Dear Dan: Please see here below the response from our Head of Manuscripts & Archives, where the posters reside, and the department to which such materials are paged back from the remote shelving facility.
So, yes, with some detailed advance planning, it will be possible for you to work with MSSA (Diane Kaplan, copied here as your key contact in MSSA) to view the posters of interest to you (not all of them!) and to take some lo res photos.
Please keep in touch with further questions and do update me on the progress of your work if it includes Yale's Near East Collections.
Best of success, Ann Okerson
Associate University Librarian
________________________________________
From: Weideman, Christine
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 8:26 AM
To: Okerson, Ann; Massa, William
Cc: Kaplan, Diane
Subject: RE: Ph.D. Student Inquiry re. Arabic posters
Ann, we allow researchers to use digital cameras in the reading room - they have to sign off that they understand that the materials they photograph could be covered by copyright. We have no idea about copyright status of the materials in either collection, so we don't know the implications of him putting low res images on a web site. You can ask him to message Diane Kaplan about his trip and please to do so well in advance of his trip - the Arabic Film Poster Collection is very large and we'll need him to review the online finding aid before he comes and narrow down the boxes of materials he wants to review.
Let us know if you have any questions -
-----Original Message-----
From: Okerson, Ann
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 9:45 PM
To: Weideman, Christine; Massa, William
Cc: Okerson, Ann
Subject: Ph.D. Student Inquiry re. Arabic posters
Dear Chris & Bill: This fellow is a graduate student at Georgetown, working on his thesis. He initially wrote to SML ref on 12/15 to ask the name of the artist on one of our Arabic posters. Then, his messages got to me. etc. etc. It turns out that the name on the scanned poster copy he was originally interested in (and still is) is not legible. He then learned that we have two Arabic poster collections:
1. Films, 1200 posters
2. Palestine Intifada, 92 posters.
As far as I can understand, both sets are MSSA holdings and both are in LSF. A few were digitized for an online exhibit. After some back and forth, see his request immediately below.
He has a database currently of some 4,000 Palestine posters. Getting all the major university, governmental, private and political archives of Palestine posters online and fully identified and credited is his goal (he will fully credit Yale items that he uses). He also notes that his intent would be to create a "special collection" online of Yale University's Palestine Posters on his siste -- which we can then link to; that would be a nice service enhancement. And if so, then he would do the work of taking a photo and creating the Yale subset in his database. I don't know what our policies are about photos, either.
What may I reply? I've explained all the complexities of offsite, space, short-staffedness, and more.
Many thanks, Ann
****
Q: If I were to schedule a visit to your library would I be permitted to:
1) Actually see the two collections (Subject to YU's schedule/staff/etc.)
2) Take lo res digital shots (using my own hand-held camera with no flash) of relevant Palestine posters for use in my thesis project web site?
Many thanks for your patience and professionalism.
Dan Walsh (liberation@igc.org)