Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Details for 4,000 document on/about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. now online

A news item in the Stanford Report last week announced that:
Details and descriptions of more than 4,000 documents on or about Martin Luther King Jr. will go public when Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute launches a new online database on May 18. An additional 4,000 document records will be available by year's end.
Later in the press release it states:
Because of copyright issues with the King Estate, the documents themselves will not be available online, but scholars will be able to discover from the records which original documents exist and contact the participating institutions to get access to them.
Good news in general, but still a bit maddening that the full-text will not be online. While I totally understand why copyright exists, my heart believes that King's words would do much more good if they were in the public domain or available through a Creative Commons license.


Technorati tag:

No comments: