University of Florida Libraries Joins HathiTrust and Orphan Works Project

University of Florida (UF) Libraries yesterday announced that it has become the latest academic library to join the HathiTrust digital repository—and the third library, after those of the University of Michigan (UM) and the University of Wisconsin (UW), to climb aboard UM's ambitious project to identify orphan works and make them available electronically.

UM first announced its orphan-works identification project in May and its intention to make full-text digital copies of those works available to the UM community last month. Orphan works are defined as in-copyright but out-of-print works for which the copyright holders cannot be identified. As out-of-print works, they can be relatively rare and hard to come by, so online electronic versions could vastly improve accessibility for scholars.

Last month, UM associate university librarian and HathiTrust executive director John Wilkin told LJ that other HathiTrust partners would be teaming up with UM to identify orphan works in a joint effort. "Since we often hold the same volumes, doing the work for one [institution] is doing the work for all," he said.

Access for academic communities
UF's orphan works would be accessible to "UF students and faculty wherever there is a connection to the Internet, and of course, the print copy remains available if needed," according to the announcement.

The first orphan works could become available as soon as October. UM plans to release its first public list of potential orphan works and their bibliographic information—focusing on works published between 1923 and 1963—on UM's and HathiTrust's sites later this month. [Update: The first orphan-works list was posted online on July 15.] If, after 90 days, no rights-holder comes forward, those works will be deemed orphans, which would then become available in full online.

As with UF, UM's and UW's orphan works would be made available only to members of their respective communities. This would adhere to an interpretation of the Copyright Act's "fair use" provision (Section 107), which allows limited reproduction of works for scholarly purposes.