Alan asked if we could help by providing drafts of lay-readable about Museum Policies and Procedures:

Several universities have posted links to their policies and procedures on the university testbed discussion. /HyperNews/get/testbed/rights.html - thread 2 is about policies. Often the policies about licensed data are contained in broader policies about academic conduct. Nevertheless, they are, doubtless, applicable to museums.

The rudiments, probably are that the institution obtains some resources (software, data, etc.) through licenses. The terms of these licenses limit what staff and other permitted users can do and the institution is often liable for their misbehavior or at least responsible for acting against them. Therefore, when resources are made available under license, the institution should always notify its employees whenever they use them. The institution should provide clear, succinct, statement of doâs and donât and easy access to the full terms of the license. If in doubt, employeeâs are responsible for contacting management (or general counsel if you have one) to ask specifically because the ultimate responsibility for their conduct, is theirs alone.

With respect to the AMICO license the clearest lay statement terms are those in our discussion documents from last summer. We drafted them together to expressed in non-legal language what we understood the ground rules to be, before they were given to Michael Shapiro and other lawyers to create these agreements. Weâd suggest you return to those documents to extract the degree of detail you want in your instructions to users.

If you are getting specific questions, we hope that youâll forward them to the FAQ discussion. Over time, then, an increasing proportion of specific questions will be answered that way.