Big Collections in an Era of Big Copyright: Practical Strategies for Making the Most of Digitized Heritage

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Presentation

Slides:
Big Collections in an Era of Big Copyright
Rights Statements in Digital Object Aggregators

Session Description
Digitized collections of cultural and scholarly heritage can be much more useful to researchers when not limited to materials more than 90 years old. Yet the challenges and risks of going beyond materials old enough to clearly be out of copyright can seem daunting, especially for larger collections.

This panel features a discussion of how projects like HathiTrust, DPLA, and Europeana face these challenges at scale to make a large number of more recent materials available to their audiences.

Topics discussed will include systems and analyses that enable public domain review of hundreds of thousands of volumes; using rights of libraries, preservation, accessiblity, and fair use to their full extent; documenting and communicating copyright determinations across diffuse collborations; promoting robust reuse rights for contributed content; and dealing with takedowns and legal disputes. The session aims to develop better understandings of the full range of materials and services we can provide under copyright law for digital collections, and promote discussions of how we can collaborate in bringing a wider range of cultural and scholarly materials and services to our users.

Session Leaders
John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania
Melissa Levine, University of Michigan
Jeremy York, HathiTrust
Mark Matienzo, Digital Public Library of America

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