Over the past 2 months I’ve shared information with you about the Copyright records and the plans, challenges, and visions for preserving them in a digital form and making them widely available online. Today’s post is a brief update on recent progress. First, I’m happy to report that digitization of the records is continuing. …
A few weeks ago I posted examples of pre-1978 Copyright registration records. There’s an equally important set of companion records reflecting the assignments and transfers of rights that were recorded in the Copyright Office between 1870 and 1977. Indexed and filed separately from the registrations, these records must be consulted to see the full picture …
Copyright records serve a variety of information needs from finding the current owner of a work to a survey of cultural development in the United States. Users of the records approach them in different ways depending on their particular need at the moment. Similarly, there are different approaches to how we can make the currently …
During the first 6 weeks of this blog’s existence we’ve received many thoughtful and helpful comments from visitors. Your comments are being carefully studied and used as input to decision making about what records to work on first and how to capture, index and make them available. Optical character recognition (OCR) and crowd sourcing have …
There are about 70 million cards and record book pages among the pre-1978 Copyright records. I thought it might be interesting to show some examples of these paper records, kind of a show and tell post. Three types of records are shown below. Click on any of the thumbnails below to see a larger image. …
The number of non-digital Copyright records (70 million) and the constraints on funding make the digitization of copyright records a long-term project. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make some records available sooner rather than later. We’re looking at several strategies and are eager for your feedback and ideas. First, we can demonstrate what’s possible, …
A detailed analysis of the Copyright records has been completed, and test scanning has been done to determine the best digitization parameters for the several formats of the records. For optimal preservation, the records will be scanned in uncompressed tagged image file format (TIFF) at a minimum of 300 pixels per inch (ppi) in 24 …
A principal goal of the Copyright Office is to digitize the content of the card catalog records. This work is already underway. The card catalog is considered the most up-to-date index to copyright records prior to 1978. It has been updated over time to reflect corrections and changes sometimes with handwritten annotations and sometimes with new …
From 1870 to 1977 there were 16.4 million works registered in the Copyright Office. Many are still under protection of the Copyright law. During that same time, the assignment or transfer of rights was recorded for more than 1.7 million works. So how do you determine if a particular work is still under copyright and …
The following is a guest post by Maria A. Pallante, Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. Help Wanted: Have you ever attempted to build an electronic index and searchable database of a complex and diverse collection of 70 million imaged historical records? Neither have we. Current records dating back to 1978 …