Studying the “undetermined” category in the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS)

Abstract

The Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) was a project designed to determine the copyright status of books in the HathiTrust digital library. Beginning in 2008, CRMS-US focused on reviewing books published in the United States between 1923-1963. By late 2014, the CRMS-US project had reviewed over 310,000 volumes and identified roughly 164,000 as public domain. An additional significant category emerged during the CRMS-US project -- “und/nfi” (undetermined/need further investigation) -- volumes presenting complex copyright questions that were too complicated for the streamlined, production oriented CRMS process. We have executed a deeper examination of approximately 300 volumes that were initially determined to be und/nfi. Specifically, we sought to better understand the likelihood that individual inserts were in copyright. We studied the independent copyright status of individual inserts within a given volume, creating a representation of the volume and its component parts. In studying inserts more closely, we’ve taken a first step towards evaluating the costs and challenges of providing access to these materials in Library digital collections.