On August 1, 2024, the Copyright Office hosted a public webinar, Level Up Your Copyright Public Records Search, sharing ways of searching copyright public records using our pilot of the new Copyright Public Records System (CPRS). CPRS is an easy-to-navigate, highly searchable database with the ability to download, save, email, and share public records such as …
This summer, the Copyright Office reached a new milestone in our modernization efforts: one million card catalog records have been digitized with searchable metadata and added to the Office’s Copyright Public Records System (CPRS) pilot. Learn more about CPRS, the Office’s digitization efforts, and historical registration application cards in this blog post.
Zitkála-Šá was a prolific writer, political activist, and musician, credited as the first Native American to write an opera, The Sun Dance Opera. However, despite her contributions, Zitkála-Šá does not appear on the copyright records for the work.
Not only is the Library of Congress celebrating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth all month, but May is also the anniversary of Leaves of Grass, one of Whitman’s best-known works. Walter Whitman (as he called himself then) registered his copyright for the first edition of Leaves of Grass on May 15, 1855, in …
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 …
The following is a guest post by Tracie Coleman, Information Section head of the Licensing Division. I began my career in the U.S. Copyright Office in 1991. For ten years, I worked as a bibliographer in the Copyright Public Records Reading Room (CPRRR). When responding to public requests for copyright information, I was responsible for …
The following is a guest post by Shawn Gallagher, management and program analyst. As a child growing up in the 1970s, one of my most prized possessions was a Luke Skywalker action figure. He was the hero of my youth, and I was surprised to learn recently that Luke wasn’t always a Skywalker. He was …
