The full set of Copyright Card Catalog images is now available online in our Virtual Card Catalog (VCC) Proof of Concept. A full year after our first release of the VCC in January 2018, the VCC has come a long way.
We began last year by releasing nearly eighteen million card images from 1955 to 1977 to better understand how a virtual card catalog would work and how people might use it. We received some great feedback from our survey, which you can continue to take on the VCC webpage. The most requested features were the ability to find text on a card and to see the complete catalog. In July, we added the ability to filter the 1955-1977 cards based on the metadata from optical character recognition (OCR). Since then we have been adding card images from 1870 to 1954, which include copyright registrations, assignments, notice of use, commercial prints and labels, title indexes, and pseudonym files.
We have also revamped the look and feel to help browse through the newly added indexes. As you browse through the earlier years of the card catalog, you’ll notice a transition from typed cards to handwritten cards. We have added card text metadata where possible, but most of the handwritten cards do not contain OCR text. We are looking for ways to further enhance the VCC in the future, so visit the website, take our survey, and let us know what you think.