[open-bibliography] Public domain identification at the University of Michigan

Tom Morris tfmorris at gmail.com
Wed Aug 18 18:11:52 UTC 2010


That sounds like a great project!  I had a quick look and have a few
questions right off the bat:

- Is any machine assistance used to aid in the process of looking up
copyright renewals, etc or is this entirely a manual process?
- Is the bibliographic data which is available for retreival through
the API in the public domain?
- Is there an easy way to submit corrections (a la OpenLibrary) to the
bibliographic data?
  (As luck would have it, the very first record I pulled had a typo in
the publisher field http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005730998)
- Is any special handling being done for reprints in determining
copyright status?  For example,
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005714794 is an 1896 book
republished in the 1980s with a new title page, but 99.99% of the book
is a photographic reproduction of the 1896 text (and presumably not
subject to copyright).

Thanks for doing this work to increase the pubic commons!

Tom




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