Category Archives: oa.hathi

It’s No Secret – Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public… | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from our libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522.

The Copyright Review Program, now an operational program of HathiTrust, began as a grant-funded ambition of the University of Michigan Library, under the leadership of Melissa Levine. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded three consecutive grants enabling the University of Michigan Library and grant collaborators to build a copyright review management system. The program is still going strong eleven years later, resulting in hundreds of publications determined to be in the public domain each week.

One way the Copyright Review Program determines the copyright status of items in the HathiTrust corpus is to determine whether they were properly renewed. In the United States, the copyright in works published between 1924 and 1964 had to be renewed about 28 years after the item was published; works could move into the public domain when their initial term of protection expired. The Stanford Copyright Renewal Database was one of the first to host monograph renewal records in an open access database, but much of the initial copyright registration information remains difficult to search. …”

Copyright Review Program | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Each year we invite your continued participation and seek new team members for copyright review projects. 

Typically there will be a call for nominations in September and January each year.  The January 2019 open call has been completed and participants selected for this year.

There was an informational webinar about the Participating in the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program held on September 11, 1:00-2:00pm ET for anyone seeking to learn more about participation.  Slides and recording.

To nominate for a copyright team member position on the US Monographs project you must:

be employed at a HathiTrust member institution
have the support of your institution to contribute 6 hours of regular work time each week for a year
be present at online class training sessions or watch the recorded classes promptly (late Feb-Mar)…”

Copyright Review Program | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Each year we invite your continued participation and seek new team members for copyright review projects. 

Typically there will be a call for nominations in September and January each year.  The January 2019 open call has been completed and participants selected for this year.

There was an informational webinar about the Participating in the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program held on September 11, 1:00-2:00pm ET for anyone seeking to learn more about participation.  Slides and recording.

To nominate for a copyright team member position on the US Monographs project you must:

be employed at a HathiTrust member institution
have the support of your institution to contribute 6 hours of regular work time each week for a year
be present at online class training sessions or watch the recorded classes promptly (late Feb-Mar)…”

Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain / Boing Boing

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“But there’s another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed. The problem has been to figure out which of these works were in the public domain, because the US Copyright Office’s records were not organized in a way that made it possible to easily cross-check a work with its registration and renewal.

For many years, the Internet Archive has hosted an archive of registration records, which were partially machine-readable.

Enter the New York Public Library, which employed a group of people to encode all these records in XML, making them amenable to automated data-mining.

Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what’s more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status)….”

Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain / Boing Boing

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“But there’s another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed. The problem has been to figure out which of these works were in the public domain, because the US Copyright Office’s records were not organized in a way that made it possible to easily cross-check a work with its registration and renewal.

For many years, the Internet Archive has hosted an archive of registration records, which were partially machine-readable.

Enter the New York Public Library, which employed a group of people to encode all these records in XML, making them amenable to automated data-mining.

Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what’s more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status)….”

Authors Guild Attacks Libraries For Lending Digital Books | Techdirt

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“It’s been a few years since we last had to write about the Authors Guild — a group that ostensibly represents authors’ interests, but really acts more like a front group for publishers’ interests (often in opposition to the actual interests of authors). As you may recall, the Authors Guild spent tons of the money authors gave it for dues on suing libraries. Specifically it sued and lost against Hathitrust (a collection of libraries which were scanning books to make a searchable index), and then had the same result with Google and its book scanning project. In both cases, the courts deemed such scanning and indexing as fair use — a transformative use of the work.

Apparently, unable to comprehend that maybe it shouldn’t attack libraries, the Authors Guild is at it again, threatening the Internet Archive and other libraries for daring to start a carefully designed program to lend out copies of some of their scanned works. The system, called Controlled Digital Lending was put together by a bunch of libraries and the Internet Archive to lay out a system that they believe is clearly covered by fair use, by which digital scans of certain books could be made available on loan like any other library book. The whole setup of the Controlled Digital Lending system is carefully laid out and designed to mimic traditional library lending….”

Open Access Tools & Resources – Tinkering Librarians

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“When following a conference on Twitter last week, one attendee tweeted about Unpaywall. It was the first time they had heard of it, which surprised me at first. I was equally surprised that the Open Access Button had not been mentioned at the same time.  I realize now that I have had the benefit of attending OpenCon and following many people active in Open for a while now. Below I will list some of the open tools and resources, which hopefully, someone will find useful.”

Rights Holder Creative Commons Declaration Form | www.hathitrust… | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“If you are a copyright holder or a representative of a copyright holder of a work in HathiTrust and would like to authorize the work to be opened for full view, the following form enables you to select a Creative Commons license and authorize HathiTrust to release the work….”

Assisting living authors in opening access to their in-copyright works: a report from Iceland

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Abstract: This article reports on a project, spanning the years 2013 to 2015, that assisted living Icelandic authors in opening access to out-of-print books that they wished to make publicly available. While this effort was small in scale, it sheds light on the complexities of releasing still-in-copyright works by living authors under a Creative Commons license. The project worked primarily with books that had been digitized by Google and included in HathiTrust’s collections. The project showed that Icelandic authors of older scholarly works were generally very interested in releasing them to the public at no charge by changing their rights status in HathiTrust. Meanwhile, authors who wished to release works that had not already been scanned were sometimes frustrated in their efforts to do so. The article concludes with some reflections on the benefits and drawbacks of author-by-author rights clearance, as compared to other ways of increasing the accessibility of out-of-print titles