Feb 07 2009
Move Over, Sherlock!
In the last few posts, I showed you some basic ways of using the Internet to find and contact a copyright holder. But if all permissions requests were so simple, I’d be bored to tears in no time. Fortunately for me, I get to don my own deerstalker hat periodically. Move over, Sherlock Holmes! One of my favorite (and successful, I might add) searches started simply enough. The college professor whose book I was working on wanted to include a “Letter to the Editor” in her textbook. The good news was that the professor knew the issue and date of the newspaper where the letter was published. The bad news? The letter was published in 1986 and this was now 2006.
Since copyright ownership of Letters to the Editor are held by the letter writer and not by the newspaper, I had a feeling that this one was going to be a challenge. I started by contacting the newspaper in the hopes that the original letter might still be in their morgue. If so, I could get the writer’s contact information and start my search there. No luck. The newspaper hadn’t kept the original.
All I had to go on was the writer’s name and that the letter was sent to the LA Times. At least the writer’s name wasn’t Mary Smith!
I began by doing a Google search on the writer’s name. After all, it was possible that the person had written other things over the years. Again, no such luck. But I did learn that the writer’s surname was common in India. I made a phone call to my doctor (who is from India) and asked her if she could tell if the writer’s first name belonged to a man or a woman. It was a woman’s name. Now I could add another facts to my list. The letter writer was a woman with an Indian surname.
Over the next few months I would spend about an hour each week searching on the Internet for the letter writer. My searching finally turned up a tantalizing clue. A person with the same first and last name had taught a Japanese cooking class at UCLA in the ‘70s. But this was not a class open to students; it was a class geared to UCLA faculty members and their families.
After thinking this over, I decided I would send a general inquiry to all UCLA faculty members with the same surname. I received a lot of “Sorry, I don’t know this person” replies. I had a few ‘no responses.’ Then, I struck pay dirt! I received an e-mail from a retired UCLA professor who identified the letter writer as his wife! I was so excited!
I wrote back to the professor and asked if he could provide me with contact information for his wife. It turned out that the couple was in the middle of a three-month trip to New Zealand and wouldn’t be returning home for several weeks. By now I had been searching for this person for several months and my deadline was just weeks away. After exchanging a series of e-mails, we worked it out that I would fax the permissions request form to the New Zealand hotel where the couple was staying. I also gave the professor my UPS account number so that the form could be returned to me after the wife signed it. Success!!
My deerskin hat could go back on the closet shelf until the next time.
© 2009 Anne Wallingford. All Rights Reserved.
