The University of Michigan Library (U-M Library) users will soon gain access to digital versions of some of the thousands of orphan works held in common by the U-M Library and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Making these works available in HathiTrust will render them fully searchable, viewable, and accessible to U-M researchers wherever there is a connection to the Internet.
This marks the next phase in the library's orphan works project, following last month's announcement that the MLibrary Copyright Office has begun identifying orphan works from among the millions of in-copyright digitised books in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Making these orphan works accessible to the U-M community will reportedly begin to unlock that large portion of the 20th century scholarly and cultural digital record that is in copyright and unavailable because copyright holders cannot be found or contacted.
The library's intent is to foster these works and make them available so they can be used.
Access to orphan works will be limited to U-M authenticated users and visitors to the campus libraries in Ann Arbor, and to works that the library holds in its print collection. In other words, the same population that can check out these works from the library's print collection now will be able to read the digital copies from other locations.
Other institutions among the HathiTrust's more than 50 partners, including the University of Wisconsin, are moving forward with similar plans to share digitised orphan works from their own collections. The orphan works identification activity is seen as an extension of the grant-funded Copyright Review Management System, which examines US works published during 1923-63 to determine whether they are in copyright. That work began at U-M, and now includes reviewers at Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota. Of the more than 135,000 volumes reviewed thus far, approximately 46 percent are in copyright.
The orphan works project begins with this 46 percent; and the task of identifying true orphan works from among millions of in-copyright volumes eventually will be shared by other HathiTrust partner institutions.
The identification work now is being carried out at U-M under the auspices of the MLibrary Copyright Office. The process is documented online at www.lib.umich.edu/orphan-works. Every prospective orphan work's bibliographic information will be listed in the HathiTrust Digital Library and on the MLibrary website for 90 days, after which, if no copyright holder emerges, it will be made accessible to U-M users.
The library expects that some of these works will be accessible to the U-M community by early October.
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