A wide range of people choose to deposit private records with PRONI. Depositors can choose how their private records are managed through completing a ‘deposit agreement’ agreement with PRONI.
What is a Deposit Agreement?
A deposit agreement outlines what private records you are depositing with PRONI. It sets out our role and responsibility in relation to your collection. It also outlines your role and responsibility as a depositor. The deposit agreement allows a depositor to choose how their records will be managed by PRONI.
A member of our Private Records team will help you to choose what deposit agreement you are most comfortable with. They will also explain the options that you have within a deposit agreement form. There are three main types of deposit that you can make with PRONI.
Permanent Deposit
Choosing a Permanent Deposit Agreement means that you transfer ownership of your records to PRONI. We will be responsible for considering how best to manage public access to your records. You can still, if you wish, retain any copyright that you hold within your records. You can also specify how you wish the future re-use of your collection to be administered.
Digital records (digitised versions of physical items or born-digital material) can only be accepted on a permanent basis. This is because once an item has been processed through to PRONI’s Digital Repository for permanent preservation, it cannot be removed.
Depositors of digital records can still decide how their records are managed at PRONI including whether they are made available just through PRONI’s onsite catalogue or whether they are also made available through PRONI’s eCatalogue.
Deposit On Loan
A ‘Deposit on Loan’ Agreement allows you to retain ownership of your records while transferring them to our care. As with a permanent deposit, the terms of access and copyright will be agreed with you as part of the deposit agreement.
Temporary Deposit
Temporary Deposits are designed to allow us to borrow your documents so that we can make digital copies of them. Once we have digitised the documents, they will be returned to you. We will then agree the terms of deposit for digitised copies with you through a Permanent Deposit Agreement.
Digitisation is undertaken onsite in PRONI by our experienced Reprographics team as resources allow. We make a decision on what records we take in as temporary deposits based on criteria such as historical importance, public interest and the condition of the documents. A member of the Private Records team will discuss your records with you and let you know if they are suitable for digitisation and if we have the resources to digitise them.
Frequently Asked Questions
I don’t understand the options on the deposit agreement forms.
If you have any questions in relation to the deposit agreement forms or the options within them, please contact the Private Records team (Email: access@communities-ni.gov.uk)
I don’t know who holds the copyright of the documents in my collection.
In many cases, it is difficult or impossible to identify the current copyright holder of a document. If you don’t know or you are unsure, you can choose the option ‘copyright holder unknown’
Will all of the documents in my collection be made available to the public?
Where possible, your collection will be made available to the public in its entirety once it has been catalogued.
If there are documents in your collection that contain personal information relating to living individuals, PRONI cannot make these documents available without the permission of those individuals.
If you wish to restrict public access to certain documents within your collection for a defined period of time, you can discuss this with a member of the Private Records team.
What is meant by ‘permission to publish’?
If anyone wishes to reproduce a document from PRONI’s holdings (for example in an article, book, a broadcast, exhibition etc), they must first contact us to ask for ‘permission to publish’.
The options you choose in your deposit agreement form helps us to administer these requests. We will respond to these requests on your behalf unless you have asked us to contact each time we receive a permissions request.