In Copyright Content
BHL provides access to hundreds of in-copyright titles throughout our collection. Copyright holders have granted BHL consortium partners permission to include their content by way of an express agreement. In some cases, individual partner institutions within the BHL Consortium have acquired permission to digitize directly with copyright holders independent of BHL. If you are a copyright holder that would like to contribute content to the BHL collection, please see more information.
The majority of in-copyright items are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. In some cases, you may also notice in-copyright content made available under different licensing terms. Works in the BHL collection that are protected by copyright are designated by the following rights statement:
In copyright. Digitized with the permission of the rights holder.
To locate this rights statement, available in the <Copyright status> field, click on the “+” next to the volume/book link. Commercial use of CC BY-NC-SA content is strictly prohibited, however you are free to access, and download this content just as you would other, public domain works in the BHL collection. Should you wish to reuse any in-copyright content in the BHL collection for commercial purposes, you must contact rights holder directly.
Content provided under Due Diligence
In some cases, BHL has provided access to works under the following designation:
No known copyright restrictions as determined by scanning institution.
Works may fall under the “no known copyright restrictions as determined by scanning institution” designation, for the following reasons:
- the copyright has expired
- the copyright may have existed at one point but was not renewed
- there is no marking or indication of copyright on the material
- a sufficient and diligent search has been performed to determine that the copyright holder(s) cannot be located or identified
If a valid copyright claim is presented for these items, BHL will remove the content.
Archival Materials
Through projects like Connecting Content and the Smithsonian Field Books Project, archival materials are being scanned to the BHL. For the majority of these unpublished materials, copyright restrictions apply. Each item has been reviewed on a case-by-case basis and the appropriate copyright status is indicated for each. These materials may be licensed under the Creative Commons NC-BY-SA license and may not be used for commercial purposes. Check the individual volume’s metadata for more details.
Take-Down Guidelines
Please refer to the BHL Collection Development Policy for more information about out our take-down guidelines.