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Few archivists can expect to be totally unaffected by problems arising from public access to their collections nor can they remain uninvolved in the complexities of Canadian copyright legislation as it affects their ability to respond to requests for reproduction of material.Such problems are, however, an almost constant concern of the archivist responsible for literary collections.Ethical concerns involving the protection of the authors' reputation and privacy, and considerations of their rights to financial profit from unpublished material, are added to the basic archival duties of ensuring the physical security and accurate description of collections.This paper will suggest a workable approach to access, given the lack of any clearly defined policy regarding literary materials in Canada, and it will explore the copyright conundrum for a practical response which may serve until the long-promised new copyright legislation appears.It is surely axiomatic that for the archivist of any type of collection, the full and immediate availability of all material is the most desirable state of affairs.However, restrictions limiting access are sometimes imposed by donors or sellers of literary collections, and many archival institutions have developed their own structures for controlling access to their material.The archivist is sometimes confronted by a donor or seller who, while willing to dispose of an archive, insists upon limiting the availability of some parts of it for a certain period.Often such a stipulation is made to protect the privacy of people still living with whom the author has corresponded, or who may have been mentioned in letters or diaries.'The Association of College and Research Libraries' Guidelines on Manuscripts and Archives recognizes that while "every private donor has the right to impose reasonable restrictions upon his papers to protect confidentiality for a reasonable period of time ... the repository should discourage donors from imposing unreasonable restrictions and should encourage a specific time limitation on such * This paper has been adapted from the first part of an address given at the 1983 annual meeting of the Association of Canadian Archivists in Vancouver. 1 That such restrictions are not merely empty formalities is illustrated by Canadian scholar and author Phyllis Grosskurth's experience in obtainingaccess to, but not permission to quote from, the papers of John Addington Symonds, and by the same author being forced to abandon a planned biography of Marie Bonaparte because of a total restriction on access until the year 2020.
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