“Since 2018, preservation services supervisor Anne Conway has spent six hours each week researching the copyright status of online books. She has now completed an outstanding 50,000 assessments as a volunteer for HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Program.
HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries—including the University Libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill—that preserves digital copies of more than 17 million books and other materials. When those texts are in the public domain, meaning they are free of copyright restrictions, then HathiTrust makes them accessible online for anyone to read….
It is meaningful work, but it can be complex. While all books first published in the United States before 1928 are in the public domain, reviewers like Conway must apply a rigorous review process to determine whether other texts can be made freely accessible.
That multi-step process includes assessing whether the book matches the project’s legal scope; determining whether its copyright has been renewed; and determining whether the book contains credits, permissions or acknowledgements indicating that the digital file might contain other copyrighted content.
This requires nuance and attention to detail. All copyright reviewers go through an extensive training program before they start evaluating texts, according to the HathiTrust website. Even then, each file has to be assessed by two independent reviewers who must agree on its status before it is made public….”