Fellows' Ernst Posner Award: Jeremy Evans and Melissa Hernández Durán

Jeremy Evans, digitization specialist, and Melissa Hernández Durán, lead archivist for audiovisual curation, both at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, are the 2019 recipients of the Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes an outstanding essay dealing with some facet of archival administration, history, theory, and/or methodology that was published during the preceding year in SAA’s journal, American Archivist.

Evans and Hernández Durán are being honored for “Rights Review for Sound Recordings: Strategies Using Risk and Fair Use Assessments,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2018 issue of American Archivist (vol. 81, no. 2). Their article is a large-scale case study on the management of intellectual property rights for digitized sound recordings. Their work presents a generalizable model for identifying the complexities of access to digitized recordings based on the recording’s genre and proposes a scalable review process that balances risk assessment and fair use.

The SAA Awards Committee noted that the article is “clearly conceptualized and written with generous recognition of the works of others.” The authors also provide helpful examples of processing forms based on actual digitized audio collections. Read the award-winning article online at AmericanArchivist.org.