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Supporting Document D: Public-Private Cooperation Task Force
Depositing Films With Archives: A Guide to the Legal Issues
Why deposit your film(s) with an archive?
Archives play a central role in preserving America's film heritage. Many filmmakers, from D.W. Griffith to Andy Warhol, are known today largely though works that came into the safekeeping of these institutions. Archives not only make films available for research, study, and appreciation, they also provide secure storage often in low-temperature, low-humidity environments designed expressly to protect film. For active filmmakers, archives often make special arrangements to allow continued access to the materials under conditions that insure their preservation.
A "deposit agreement" defines the relationship between a donor of film materials and the archive to whom the materials are entrusted (for the sake of clarity, the term "donor" is used throughout this agreement to refer to the party entmsting the film to the archive and term "deposit agreements" is used to refer to the agreement between the donor and the archive, regardless of whether the deposit is in the fonm of a loan or a gift). Sorting through the legal issues addressed in these agreements can be complicated, particulariy for filmmakers and archives who do not have the help of legal counsel experienced in the issues raised by such arrangements. Some filmmakers, discouraged by these complexities, fail to take the necessary steps to protect their wori<, and as a result materials can be lost or destroyed. In the public hearings accompanying the Librarian's Report to Congress, entitled Film Preservation 1993, archival and scientific experts emphasized that proper storage is as key to the preservation of film as is restoration of the film elements.
In 1994, the Librarian of Congress appointed a group of task forces to encourage the development of a National Film Preservation Plan, under the guidance of the National Film Preservation Board. One of those task forces, the Public-Private Cooperation Task Force, has developed the following checklist to explain the legal issues involved in archival deposit agreements, and to do so in accessible, nontechnical language.
Introduction to the Checklist
This checklist is a tool to help donors and archives negotiate mutually beneficial agreements. It is our hope that it will help ensure the preservation of films (especially the works of independent filmmakers) by encouraging deposits of films and related materials, while at the same time decreasing the likelihood of misunderstandings regarding the archives' role and capabilities. The checklist is intended to serve several different functions:
• to introduce the legal issues that exist between owners of film materials and the archives that collect and preserve films and related materials;
Supporting Document D: Depositing Films in Archives 49