A brief status update on the digitization and public access project

We are nearing completion of the digitization of the Catalog of Copyright Entries with online availability through the Internet Archive.   645 CCE volumes are now available at http://www.archive.org/details/copyrightrecords/ ranging from the very first publication in 1891 up to and including 1978 and these cover all classes of works and all renewals.  A few volumes are still in process …

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A virtual Copyright card catalog? Tell us what you think.

Of the 25,723 drawers in the Copyright Card Catalog, more than 12,000 have already been scanned resulting in more than 17 million card images safely tucked away in Library storage.  The long term plan is to capture index terms from the card images using OCR and keyboarding and to build indexes for online searching.  But …

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Did Grandma write songs? – The personal side of Copyright records

A recent comment on the blog from Barbara tells of a musical work that she registered in the Copyright Office in the early 1970s and the disappointment that the record was not available online and might never be seen by her grandchildren.  Last December, a post on the Library’s Performing Arts blog In the Muse told …

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Where are we and where are we going? A brief status update

  Over the past 2 months I’ve shared information with you about the Copyright records and the plans, challenges, and visions for preserving them in a digital form and making them widely available online.  Today’s post is a brief update on recent progress.   First, I’m happy to report that digitization of the records is continuing.  …

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Assignments and transfers: The other Copyright records

A few weeks ago I posted examples of pre-1978 Copyright registration records.  There’s an equally important set of companion records reflecting the assignments and transfers of rights that were recorded in the Copyright Office between 1870 and 1977.  Indexed and filed separately from the registrations, these records must be consulted to see the full picture …

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What we’re hearing. – Some feedback on your comments

During the first 6 weeks of this blog’s existence we’ve received many thoughtful and helpful comments from visitors.  Your comments are being carefully studied and used as input to decision making about what records to work on first and how to capture, index and make them available.  Optical character recognition (OCR) and crowd sourcing have …

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