Hi,

We're a small historical society - budget under $500,000/yr, 6 FT staff
- with an archives and reading room.  Access to the reading room stacks
is free, access to archive files (brought out by archivist) is $5 for
non-residents, $3 for city residents, and free for society members and
students of any age.  For research requests by e-mail/phone/ mail, we
charge $15 an hour and report all our findings including negative ones
(we checked the following resources and found nothing).  We charge 25
cents a page for photocopies, $5 for computer scans of photographs
(printed on good inkjet photo paper), and a $25 use fee per image.  The
use fee is regardless of use - many places charge more for use in a
television show, less for postcards, etc.  We do waive the fee for
scholarly articles and publications.  We have a separate income line
item in our budget for Archives - the research, copy, and use fees go
into it - last fiscal year we "made a profit" - brought in more than we
spent on archival supplies.  We're constantly improving our storage and
spend a lot on archival folders, paper, photo and ephemera sleeves,
boxes, etc. - so offsetting that expense with our fees is a big deal for us.

I encourage you to establish reasonable fees.  Few people balk at our
fees, and we always explain the money goes directly to preserving the
collection.  We have no significant costs in processing the fees - money
goes in an envelope, our bookkeeper counts it and enters the amount
under Archive Income.  Free publicity from appearing in publications
only generates more researchers, more work, more impact on the
materials, without the money to buy supplies.

John Marks
Curator
Geneva (NY) Historical Society

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