“The [Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, OSC] recently released a report, “Digitizing Orphan Works: Legal Strategies to Reduce Risks for Open Access to Copyrighted Orphan Works” by David R. Hansen, Clinical Assistant Professor and Faculty Research Librarian at UNC School of Law….The OSC hopes the report will stimulate further digitization of orphan works, greater use, and greater open access.

To pursue these goals, the OSC is launching a program to identify orphan works in the Harvard Library collections, and build a carefully curated online list called the Orphan Works List (OWL).?OWL will include a detailed record the work, including any critical metadata.?OWL will also serve as a verified notice that we are calling for public help in identifying the rightsholders of the listed works. Each work will have a date and time stamp indicating when we added it to the public list. By using the law and strategy outlined in the Digitizing Orphan Works report, and previously documented strategies, we hope we can eventually open these works to the world….”