As Sarah says, this is a thorny issue, and I think we're all still feeling our way forward on it.  Philosophically, I don't have a problem with including a reproduction in the collection, so long as all of the provenance and technical information is included in the catalog record.  We already have quite a number of copy prints in the collection that were made many years ago of photos that could only be borrowed, and many of those copies are of lesser quality than I can now make from a scan of an original.



An important factor in the decision is always the quality of the scan; we don't put any scans in the collection that we haven't made ourselves, at high resolution and in an uncompressed format.  Other sorts of scans or "born digital" photos that are offered to us that contain significant information we treat the same way we would newspaper clippings, etc., retaining an uncatalogued copy in our reference files.  When we scan a borrowed photo here, we also have an archival-quality print made from the scan, and that print is then numbered, catalogued, and stored in the usual way; the digital file is treated much like a negative, and stored separately.  The deed of gift gives us all the same rights to the scan that we would have to the original.



Needless to say, we would prefer to own the original print or negative, but sometimes that just isn't possible, and so far this procedure has been the best compromise we've been able to come up with.



Patrick Leary

Curator

Wilmette Historical Museum







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