RE: Internet Archive's Open-Text Archives Initiative

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

It seems Harvard is indeed planning to scan books still in copyright, but,
paradoxically (and legally), not provide general access to them:

(from their faq):
http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html

"In the coming months, staff from Google will collaborate with Harvard's
libraries on a pilot project to digitize about 40,000 of the 15 million
volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will
provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the
public domain. ...

"The pilot will allow Harvard and Google to evaluate the technical,
operational, organizational, policy, and other issues involved if the
University were to undertake a much larger digitization project involving
the majority of the Harvard library book collections.  ... "The larger
project has the promise of enormous benefit to the Harvard community, the
larger scholarly community, and the general public.

"For users outside of Harvard, the larger project would make accessible
the full text of a large number of public-domain books. It would also make
the copyrighted portion of the Harvard collection searchable. Including
works from the vast Harvard library collection in an information location
tool available on the Internet would greatly expand the scope and quality
of information available to a worldwide audience of knowledge-seekers.

"For the Harvard community, we hope to be able to integrate the Harvard
and Google systems. Harvard users would be able to use Google as one more
way to search for Harvard library content. The full text of public-domain
works in the collection would be available by way of the Google digital
copy and would be accessible through both Google and the Harvard online
HOLLIS Catalog. We would also hope to provide Harvard users with selected
information (such as snippets of text or tables of contents) to aid in
determining the relevance of a work. For books stored at the Harvard
Depository (HD), this would provide users better information before they
request the return of a book to campus. "

As I see it, the scanning of such works would seem to fall under the US
section 108c exception for preservation copies, at least for out-of-print
books. Further, they will not be accessible for reading even within
Harvard, and the various uses of them intended all seem clearly within
fair use.  I cannot imagine that Harvard would proceed otherwise.

The pilot project seems well designed to investigate whether this is worth
doing for copyright material, considering the relatively limited
usefullness of the material until the date when the copyright expires in
future years. It is understandable why the libraries prefer to reproduce
first the material which is out of copyright.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Sally Morris (ALPSP)
Sent: Thu 12/30/2004 10:06 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Internet Archive's Open-Text Archives Initiative
 
Some libraries have said that they are, at least for now, concentrating on
out-of-copyright works.  However, if you look at the Harvard press release
you will see that they do not believe such a restriction is necessary;  I
would beg to differ.

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
E-mail:  chief-exec@alpsp.org