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[mcelrata@xxxxxxxxxxx (McElrath Andrea)]

-----Original Message-----
From:	Andrea McElrath [SMTP:mcelrata@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent:	Monday, July 08, 2002 9:38 AM
To:	'digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject:	

To all,

I have a question that was asked of me by one of our 
professors here at St. John's.  This professor has put 
together a bibliographic web site on Aristotle.  Right now 
this site contains only citations, title, author, year 
published etc.  He would eventually like to include 
abstracts for each citation which could probably number 
into the thousands.  This professor will not be writing the 
abstracts himself but would like to copy each abstract 
exactly as he finds them and post them to his web site.

His question is who owns the copyright to these abstracts? 
 And can he do something like this or does he have to get 
permission from each author or from each index publisher if 
that is the case?   To explain, in many cases the 
abstract(s) could be written by the author of the article 
and/or book.  Or it could have been written by someone (a 
librarian or other professional or perhaps even a 
non-professional) working for a publisher of indexes. 
(Wilson, Lexus-Nexus, MLA, PsychAbstracts, etc.)  Would 
getting permission from one of these publishers help?  Does 
he need to speak with a copyright lawyer or other 
professional knowledgable in this field?

I would really appreciate any help or direction anyone 
could give me regarding this.

Thank you.

Andrea McElrath
Reference/ILL/Periodical Librarian
St. John's University
Staten Island Campus
mcelrata@xxxxxxxxxxx