I am really sorry to read some of the messages regarding this subject - I feel they are not at all helpful, and only serve to inflame the situation. Beverley has a problem.  I presume that she wishes to remain on good terms with the staff at the library where she has obviously has spent many, many hours transcribing.  But the staff believe that there is a problem with what she has been doing and defiance is not going to help her situation.   Let's pause for a moment and change the scene.  If she had been copying many pages of one of the books in the library and republishing them on her website, it would be quite clear that copyright had been infringed.  Is a collection of index cards somehow different?   The difference might lie in whether she has copied verbatim, or extracted information.  If she republished whole pages of the imaginary book that would breach copyright, but she would be free to republish information obtained from those pages in her own format (preferably with acknowledgment of her source). Maybe the same applies to the cards.  If she had been photographing them and publishing the photos on her website, that is rather different from extracting information from the cards, reformatting it to suit her own needs, and publishing it on her website.   The issue at hand is the ownership of the cards, NOT the ownership of the facts displayed on them.  My guess is that the Library is the owner of the cards, which would have been donated by the person who transcribed them from the Church registers..  As owners the Library would I think have rights to set conditions around how their property is used.  For example they allow some items to be borrowed, while others may be consulted only in the library, etc.  If they decide that these cards may be consulted but not copied "en masse" I think that is their right.  Copyright may not have been the best term to use in this context, since the cards are not "published". Now, getting back to Beverley.  I think she has good reason to write to the CEO of the library (Head Librarian or whatever) explaining what has happened, and pointing out that she has made no secret of what she has been doing for years.  She has done this copying in good faith, for the good of the community at large, and it is now unreasonable to ask her to take down her website after so much effort has gone into it.  She could also make the point that even if she wished to take it down it would still be accessible on Wayback, to which others would no doubt provide links. She could then ask the library for guidance about how much information they could agree to her extracting from the cards.   Good luck, Beverley.