Introduction

In collaboration with Universidad Complutense de Madrid, HathiTrust’s first partner outside the United States, we piloted a project to review Spanish-language books published in Spain. Complutense was interested in a significant number of scans of the books from their collection; they wanted to make these available for annotation. The books had not yet been reviewed for copyright status and were thus inaccessible to users in Spain. Specifically, the Complutense researchers prepared a list of Spanish author names and death dates to inform the scope of our inquiry. Complutense approached HathiTrust with a proposal for collaboration with LEETHI (Literaturas Españolas y Europeas del Texto al Hipermedia) and ILSA (Implementation of Language-Driven Software and Applications) research groups. Their project, “Mnemosine: The Digital Library of Rare and Forgotten Spanish Texts (1868–1939),” centered on building a system for annotating public domain digital texts. Our review of HathiTrust volumes facilitated this project.[76]

Project Design

The project was designed to review Spanish-language works through a modification to the CRMS-World infrastructure. The interface was adapted based on Spanish copyright law.

Workflow

We created a partition within the CRMS-World interface as a low-cost way of performing Spanish-language reviews without committing to the development of a stand-alone interface solely for Spanish publications. This allowed us to proceed quickly with only minor software development.

From a spreadsheet of Spanish authors provided by Universidad Complutense de Madrid, we selected only authors with a confirmed death date prior to 1934. Given the Spanish copyright term of author life + 80 years, we decided that any monograph with a primary author death date of 1934 or later was not an eligible candidate. The list of eligible authors was matched against bibliographic records in HathiTrust to create a candidate pool of volumes; often there would be several volumes per author.

The copyright specialist performed a preliminary test of our review process with a limited number of volumes. This check did not identify any unforeseen issues with the candidates, so we went ahead with the CRMS double-review process, following the decision tree below:

Figures 18 & 19 Decision tree for reviewing works published in Spain

Final Observations

1. A concern at the outset of this project was that reviewers would need to be fluent in Spanish. We discovered, however, that a moderate familiarity with Romance languages was sufficient. Publishing conventions and similarities in front matter, combined with online translation tools, provided enough context to analyze copyright-relevant information.
2. The resources most accessible to non-Spanish speakers were the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and Spanish Wikipedia. Language was a barrier to searching foreign language databases such as Spanish newspaper archives for author death dates. Collaboration with language specialists may help expand the scope of a copyright review project. The native speakers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid provided us with author death dates from sources such as the El País newspaper, which we would not have been able to find on our own.
3. We saw greater efficiency when works by the same author were reviewed in close proximity. A number of authors tended to publish greatly similar works with repetitive use of coauthors, editors, and illustrators. Reviewing these works in succession made it easier to recall dates and sources without repeating a recently completed search.
4. An author-based research process, in which a reviewer’s confirmation of an author’s death date and nationality could then be propagated to other works by that author, would be more efficient for copyright regimes based on the life of the author.
5. Over the course of the project, we identified information gaps, which specialists more familiar with Spanish works could have helped us resolve. (Developing a mechanism for soliciting help from a specialist community is ideal.)
6. Reviews for this pool of candidates required 56 hours. Approximately 20 hours of developer time was needed to set up the infrastructure. Average review time per volume was 18.9 minutes.

Outcomes

In total, we reviewed 730 volumes, 467 of which were determined to be in the public domain.

The primary reasons for keeping a work closed were as follows:

1. The volume was coauthored by an author who died after 1934.
2. We could not locate a coauthor’s death date.
3. The volume included in-copyright or unknown copyright photographs, paintings, and other works created by third parties.

Introduction

This pilot was conceived and run by Georgia K. Harper, a member of the CRMS Advisory Working Group and Scholarly Communications Advisor at University of Texas at Austin Libraries. She engaged the help of Carlos Ovalle and Caron Garstka, two graduate students from the UT School of Information. The project centered around the Benson Latin American Collection, a valuable resource of UT Libraries that contains materials on Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Hispanic presence in the United States.

Most volumes in the Benson collection were digitized, but at the time of this inquiry, it was not possible to obtain access to the digital scans of in-copyright works. This pilot was designed to evaluate the efficacy of reviewing physical books for the purpose of copyright review using the CRMS methodology without the interface tool.

Project Design

The project was modeled after CRMS, including two independent reviews of each volume and a narrow project scope. Lack of access to digital scans meant that the project could not employ the CRMS online interface. Data collection was by spreadsheet.

Workflow

The University of Michigan CRMS team supplied informative resources, both legal and procedural, to assist UT in setting up their workflow. The UT researchers selected a set of a hundred Argentinian monographs from the Benson collection for copyright review. Because the digital scans had not been deposited in HathiTrust, the rights metadata could not be collected in the standard CRMS fashion and thereby associated with a unique volume. Therefore, UT developed their own data collection procedure, modeling it on the data collected by CRMS. Lack of access to digital scans also necessitated a revised workflow to accommodate working with physical volumes.

According to the legal research done by UT, Argentine copyright law requires registration. Verifying registration would have been very costly and impractical to implement in the workflow, so UT began with a presumption of registration for their entire sample because registration could potentially occur at any time prior to copyright expiration. UT’s legal research also indicated that in the case of translations, authorization was required for up to ten years after the death of the author. After this time, anyone could make a translation without authorization by paying an arbitrated fee. They found that whether a translation was authorized was not always clear. This has an impact on the rights a translator could hold in the translation.

UT student researchers identified at least one reliable source for each author death date—preferably two sources in accordance with CRMS-World standards. Two people at UT independently reviewed each volume and then examined the results jointly. Useful Argentinian author death date resources included the UT catalog, Biblioteca del Congreso, Wikipedia, LoC Name Authorities, Google Search, social media such as LinkedIn, university websites, newspaper articles, Biografias y Vidas, Minibiografias, and Todotango.com.

Final Observations

1. Digital scans are essential to a viable process for copyright review. Selecting a sample from the Benson collection and then pulling volumes from the shelves was prohibitively time and labor intensive. Any large-scale review system would necessarily depend on the availability of scanned content.
2. Future projects may seek ways to engage graduate students as reviewers. Features of a program involving graduate students should include a monitored, consistent process applied to all reviewed works and minimal judgment required once a framework has been established.
3. Foreign language volumes raise specific issues related to the characteristics of the language. For example, accented characters proved to be a complicating factor for searching the catalog record.
4. Due to a sample set that was predominantly composed of late twentieth-century volumes, many of the works in the Argentine collection will not enter the public domain for many years. However, a long-term strength of this pilot was the collection of relevant metadata to assist in determining when a work would enter the public domain in the future. UT recommended including a “predicted public domain” date within the CRMS system, with a mechanism for flagging works entering the public domain at the beginning of each year.
5. Storage changes to the collection over time had an impact on how accessible the physical volumes were for this pilot.

Outcomes

One hundred volumes were reviewed; the project results are as follows:

Introduction

Over half a million books in HathiTrust are published in German, which is the second most represented language in the collection after English. This indicates a rich source of books about art, science, medicine, and classics—all prominent areas of German scholarship and heavily represented in North American research libraries. We speculate that some of these may no longer exist in Germany because of the disruption of war. If identified as public domain, these could be made widely available.

Project Design

This project was initiated by Michael Seadle, a Director and Dean at the Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft (IBI) at Humboldt and led by visiting professor Joyce Ray, Program Coordinator and Lecturer for the Johns Hopkins University Museum Studies program.

Graduate students enrolled in the IBI summer project seminar learned how to make copyright determinations on German works. Legal assumptions were formulated with collaboration from Katharina de la Durantaye, Juniorprofessur für Bürgerliches Recht, insbesondere Internationales Privatrecht und Rechtsvergleichung, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The class met with Melissa Levine via Skype under Professor Ray’s direction.

Workflow

With the help of experts in German law, the students learned about copyright as it relates to German authors’ rights and copyright term. They compiled a list of works to be examined, created a spreadsheet of editor names extracted from those works, and identified reliable resources in which to search for death date information. The students opted to take a name-based approach by assigning each editor a unique number and searching once for all works by that editor in the candidate pool. At least two students searched each editor’s name to confirm dates in multiple sources.

In order to confirm that the works researched by students and those in HathiTrust were the same, the students photocopied the front matter of each work and submitted it to staff at the University of Michigan for verification prior to applying a rights determination to the digital scan. Upon verification that the rights determinations had been performed upon matching volumes, HathiTrust then opened up the books that students identified as being public domain in Germany.

As part of the IBI coursework, students kept a record of their search process and noted their observations of the usefulness of various death date sources. Their experiences are published in a D-Lib paper, “Testing the HathiTrust Copyright Search Protocol in Germany: A Pilot Project on Procedures and Resources,” D-Lib Magazine 20, no. 9/10.

Final Observations

1. For foreign language works, the compilation of a glossary of terms and abbreviations was helpful. The students translated words and phrases most helpful when searching for and interpreting terminology used in the front matter of a work.
2. Bibliographic metadata containing author and editor death dates immensely simplified the copyright review process. Of fifty authors represented in the sample set, only twelve required a death date search. Of those twelve, despite a detailed search being performed, some editor death dates were not findable (although rough “flourished” dates could be inferred). Perhaps some copyright determinations could be based on knowledge of life-spans and living dates even when a precise death date cannot be found.
3. Students realized that volumes could have multiple entries in HathiTrust when different schools had contributed a scan of the same volume. They needed to make sure that only one copyright determination was performed when the result could be applied to multiple copies of the same work in HathiTrust.
4. As in other CRMS projects, the top two sources for death date information continued to be a work’s catalog record and the VIAF, even when the project is based on non-English works.
5. Students attempted without success to gain access to databases and records kept by German publisher Teubner-Verlag, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and VG Wort, a collecting society for German authors and publishers. It is unknown whether having access to those records would have impacted the outcome for editors whose death dates could not be discovered, but it highlighted the importance of having open resources to aid copyright determination projects.

Outcomes

The student project resulted in the following outcomes:

• Students identified author and editor death dates for 109 volumes.
• Students identified one hundred volumes as public domain; these volumes were opened in HathiTrust.
• Students identified nine volumes as in copyright; these volumes remained closed in HathiTrust.
• Students prepared a glossary of German/English publishing terms to facilitate future research of German-language works.
• Students compiled a list of reputable death date sources for German authors and editors.[77]

Introduction

Copyright review is most efficient when the catalog record contains an author’s death date.[78] When a death date is absent, the reviewer must look to outside resources for this information. CRMS-World reviewers often identified author data that had not yet been added to name authority records. However, our systems were not able to update catalog records automatically, so author data captured for a single review would not be accessible for future reviews of that author’s work.

In order to address this issue, we created a pilot project in partnership with our library’s NACO liaison to funnel author information back into NACO authority records, which are exported to VIAF each month. VIAF is a primary source for finding author death dates; it receives data from national libraries around the world. The standards national libraries have established for creating name authority records are long-standing and trustworthy. Consequently, VIAF has proven to be the most central and reliable source for author death dates that is currently available on the open web.

We offer details about this pilot project below in the hope that future copyright review projects will also contribute to this important work.

Project Design

The project was designed to engage the problem in a low-tech, low-cost way. The following parameters informed the design of this project:

Workflow

We started the pilot project with a small group of catalogers certified to meet RDA NACO standards. A few CRMS reviewers who were interested in contributing to this pilot volunteered to collect author death dates as they performed reviews. These reviewers maintained a spreadsheet with death dates identified during the course of their work. At the end of each month, the reviewers e-mailed the spreadsheet to the U-M Technical Services Division. An RDA NACO cataloger then worked through the spreadsheet to update or create NACO name authority records.[79]

On average, seventy-five death dates are collected each month and it takes an estimated fifteen minutes to update one authority record. Each cataloger regularly contributes no less than two hours per week, with the following workflow:

The NACO trained cataloger searches the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LC NAF) through OCLC Connexion for possible variants of the name. If there is an existing authority record, they add the following:

• A closing death date to a preexisting birth date in the 100 field
• Birth and/or death dates to an 046 field
• A 370 subfield c location to designate the author’s “associated place” (use established place headings, noting source in subfield 2)
• 670 fields to add citations that support the information we added; use subfield u to link to URLs as needed

They upgrade the record to RDA, if necessary, by

• changing the rules fixed field to z and adding rda to subfield e in the 040 field
• taking any other steps necessary to make sure that the record is fully RDA compliant

If the name does not have an existing authority record, the cataloger creates an authority record according to RDA rules and NACO and PCC guidelines, including death date and domicile/nationality (if available).

Catalogers are free to add additional information if available, such as other forms of a name in the 400 field. We are most concerned with the death date, associated place, and source documentation. Once the records are created or existing records are updated, they are sent to the NACO liaison for review and bibliographic file management.

Final Observations

1. Incorporate copyright-relevant information in cataloging practices. Cataloging practice does not require an author death date to be included in a record. Cataloging practice was not designed to serve copyright evaluation needs, and in many cases, the focus was on the creation of sufficient metadata for the disambiguation of content, not its complete description. With library budget cuts, catalogers may need reasons to justify spending time on what may be perceived by department managers as unnecessary information. On the contrary, this basic factual information is critical metadata today.
2. The majority of authors identified by this pilot did not have existing NACO authority records. This information gap is an area of opportunity for those who wish to assist with public domain determination. Some rich sources for death dates have been public domain books in HathiTrust and Google Books (e.g., published proceedings of professional societies with obituaries for members). Public domain material can be used to help discover information relevant to copyright determinations.
3. Rights and access issues are a primary concern for digital collection development. Enhancing authority records with optional fields does take time but also has a significant impact on our ability to identify public domain works. For books still in copyright, prediction tools can use author metadata to anticipate when works will enter the public domain.
4. The number of death dates generated by CRMS indicates the benefit of linking copyright review projects with bibliographic enhancement initiatives. However, any library with a NACO liaison can independently work on enhancing authority records. This activity does not need to be coordinated or centralized within a copyright review project like CRMS.

Outcomes

From August 2014 to July 2015, participants in the NACO project spent 143 hours resulting in 1,277 edits to an existing record or the creation of a new record. The average time per record was 14.9 minutes.

Introduction

When initially studying the question of state government documents in HathiTrust, we explored securing permission from authorized state representatives. We also looked for states that, through legislation, had explicitly dedicated government documents to the public domain. These lines of inquiry were inconclusive, and we shifted our focus to what could be accomplished through copyright review. We have found copyright review of state government documents to be straightforward, with few complications and a high likelihood of works found to be in the public domain.

Project Design

The workflow for reviewing state government documents easily mapped onto the CRMS-US infrastructure, allowing us to avoid the costs of a new project design.

These are the parameters informing the design of this project. All work was based on existing CRMS-US infrastructure and workflow modified for US state documents.

Workflow

We generated a candidate pool using standard bibliographic indicators for US state government documents. US copyright law required copyright notice through 1977, so that year became the outer boundary of our inquiry.[80]

We selected staff that were experienced with the CRMS-US decision tree and taught them the slight modifications required for reviewing US state documents. The project followed the standard CRMS double-review process using the decision tree below.

Figure 20 US state government document decision tree

During the process, reviewers confirmed that the work was in fact a state government document before focusing on three key elements:

1. The presence or absence of a copyright notice in the government document, including whether it appears in the back matter
2. Whether the work was a reprint of an earlier in-copyright work
3. Whether the work contained potentially in-copyright additional materials, such as a photograph produced by a third party

When a work did not contain third-party content, was not a reprint of an in-copyright work, and did not bear a copyright notice, it was determined to be in the US public domain.

Final Observations

1. Reviewing state government documents for a lack of copyright notice is a relatively simple workflow with a high probability of identifying volumes as in the public domain. Stats from the first five-month period showed that out of 5,527 reviews performed, 71.5 percent were found to be public domain. In comparison, the public domain average of the cumulative CRMS-US project was 51.7 percent.
2. A “bound-with” volume is one in which multiple, individually published documents have been bound together. Bound-withs present problems because they can require a lengthy process of checking internal sections of the volume for copyright notice. When one document bears a copyright notice, it will result in keeping the entire bound-with volume closed. We gave reviewers the option to disregard bound-withs due to their potential complexity. Our initial data collection showed that in 853 out of 17,307 reviews, the volume was determined to be a bound-with.
3. Copyright review based on publication with notice can potentially be applied to other types of US publications.

Outcomes

The project results, current as of March 2015, are as follows:

• 25,329 total reviews
• 9,846 exported determinations