The people’s words

One of the biggest problems for people, like Project Gutenberg, who want to digitize and share our culture’s public domain works, is tracking down and confirming that a work is no longer under copyright. Gutenberg is not alone, towards the end of last month I ran into an opinion piece on teleread arguing that Amazon is right to keep away from public domain books for this same reason.

In the United States we have a resource with authoritative records about which works are covered by copyright and which ones are in the public domain, it is called the Library of Congress. Not only does the Library of Congress have authoritative records but, as the largest library in the world, it has physical copies of more works than any other institution. Unfortunately, the Library of Congress has no plans to digitize their collection. For those of us involved with book digitization, this is something of a sore topic.

So it was a great moment for me this morning to read that the Japanese National Diet Library, a close equivalent of our Library of Congress, is digitizing all their out of copyright works. Not only is the Diet digitizing and distributing the of out of copyright works, they are also beginning a process of digitizing the portions of their collection still under copyright in order to preserve those works more easily against physical destruction.

Of course, if preservation is our goal, the true solution is obvious and has been known in this country since its founding:

“”"
[T]he lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
“”"
-Thomas Jefferson
(Boyd, ‘These Precious Monuments of…Our History,’ pp.175-6)

Whatever the reason, it is great to see leading institutions take steps to share the public domain with the public.