Orphan Works Wager: University of Michigan Giving Scholars On-Campus Access
By David Rapp Jun 22, 2011The University of Michigan (UM) Library will soon begin making digital versions of orphan works in its collection available to the UM community—setting precedent for the fair use of orphan works that could influence policies at other institutions, including the University of Wisconsin and other partners in the HathiTrust digital repository.
Orphan works are in-copyright but out-of-print works for which the current rights holders are unknown or unable to be located. The UM Library Copyright Office's HathiTrust-funded project to identify such works in the HathiTrust collection was first announced last month, as reported by LJ. It focuses on determining the status of works in the UM collection published between 1923 and 1963.
UM university librarian and dean of libraries Paul Courant said in the project announcement that sharing of orphan works falls under the fair-use provision for libraries (Section 107 of the Copyright Act). "The work we're talking about is not commercial, and most of it never was," Courant said. "It's scholarly work, mainly of interest to students, faculty, and researchers, who, these days, expect to be able access much of their research material digitally, and from locations other than the Library."
This increased access to orphan works also begins to replicate, at least in part, the broad access promised by the now-failed Google Books settlement.
First works available in October
The process to make UM's orphan works available will begin in mid-July, when UM Library unveils its first list of potential titles online. When UM staff, after research, are unable to determine the copyright holder for a work, its bibliographic information will then be placed on the UM Library website and in the online HathiTrust Digital Library for 90 days; if no rights holder comes forward, the work will be deemed an orphan and made accessible to the UM community. The first orphan works could therefore become available this October.
The books will be viewable only by authenticated UM students and faculty, as well as visitors to UM's Ann Arbor-based campus libraries; the ebooks will reside in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
UM associate university librarian and HathiTrust executive director John Wilkin said that other HathiTrust partners, such as the University of Wisconsin, were also planning to begin sharing digitized orphan works from their collections, and would team with UM's orphan-works project to do joint, and collective, research. "Since we often hold the same volumes, then doing the work for one [institution] is doing the work for all," Wilkin told LJ.
UM's goal to increase availability of digitized in-copyright works recalls a February 2011 report by the Triangle Research Libraries Network—which includes HathiTrust partners Duke University, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), North Carolina State University (NCSU), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)—which urged making more digital works accessible, even if rights holders could not be immediately determined. "The benefits to education and research are enormous and outweigh the minimal risks," the report [PDF] said.
Image courtesy of UM Orphan Works Project
