I work with a small historical society/museum in Massachusetts.  Our reproduction permissions agreement form is 10+ years old, and so we want to revisit it. I would love to look through what others are doing, so please feel free to send me a copy of yours!

More specifically, we are trying to decide if we should charge/how much we should charge for reproduction permissions. For most of our collection, we have been charging $25 for digitizing a new image, and not charging at all if a high quality image already exists, regardless of purpose of use. Most requests we get are from researchers, or other museums wanting to include an image in an exhibition, so this model has worked fairly well.

However, for our photograph collection, we previously had an exclusive agreement with Corbis (that was not renewed when they were acquired) that let them create high resolution images and license those out. Now that our contract is ended, we want to manage these licenses in house. Requests for these images are more for publications and commercial use.

In creating a fee structure, what types of things should we keep in mind? What are other museums using to guide how much they charge?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Best,

Lani O'Donnell