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

Thu Aug 19 12:55:22 UTC 2010

Tom - thank you for your interest in our work. Here are answers to your questions:

 - I would characterize this as a manual process. We have built automated querying tools into the system so a reviewer can search the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database without having to type in the title, etc. But it is up to the reviewer to then identify if the renewal records in the search results match the work they are examining, and if they don't find any renewal records it is up to them to do additional searching via truncation, etc.
 - HathiTrust is not the originator of any of the bibliographic data -  the rights or terms of use are determined by others.  In this case, records will often by constrained by the OCLC terms of use.  I'm new to this list, but I am told that in a separate email, Rufus reported on a conversation with John Wilkin about Michigan's ability to identify Michigan records that might be free of constraints, and that sort of dialogue would need to take place with each contributing institution.
 - You can send feedback about issues with the metadata in particular record or volume in the HathiTrust Catalog via the "Feedback" link at the top right of each record
 - Reprints that have been designated as in copyright based on date of republication are being evaluated as they come into our workflow, either via copyright review work, or if one is brought to our attention by a patron, usually via the HathiTrust feedback mechanism. We check to make sure the work is a true reprint (i.e. No new copyrighted material has been added to the original work) and if we can confirm that we will manually update the rights status). I did review the work that you cited and updated the rights status.

Anne Karle-Zenith
Copyright Review Project Librarian
University of Michigan
University Library
320 Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library North
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1190
(734) 764-1288

On 8/18/10 4:01 PM, "open-bibliography-request at lists.okfn.org" <open-bibliography-request at lists.okfn.org> wrote:

Message: 4
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:11:52 -0400
From: Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [open-bibliography] Public domain identification at the
        University of Michigan
To: "annekz at umich.edum List for Working Group on Open Bibliographic
        Data"   <open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org>
Message-ID:
        <AANLkTikeOW7GvrnOPGsKPPdct-9kzrbc4GxWzqmswo9a at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

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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