Everybody's Libraries | Libraries for everyone, by everyone, shared with everyone, about everything Everybody's Libraries Libraries for everyone, by everyone, shared with everyone, about everything Skip to content Home About About the Free Decimal Correspondence Free Decimal Correspondence ILS services for discovery applications John Mark Ockerbloom The Metadata Challenge ← Older posts From our subjects to yours (and vice versa) Posted on December 3, 2020 by John Mark Ockerbloom (TL;DR: I’m starting to implement services and publish data to support searching across library collections that use customized subject headings, such as the increasingly-adopted substitutes for LCSH terms like “Illegal aliens”. Read on for what I’m doing, why, and where I would value advice and discussion on how to proceed.) I’ve run the Forward to Libraries service for a few years now. As I’ve noted in earlier posts here, it’s currently used on The Online Books Page and in some Wikipedia articles to search for resources in your local library (or any other library you’re interested in) on a subject you’re exploring. One of the key pieces of infrastructure that makes it work is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) system, which many research libraries use to describe their holdings. Using the headings in the system, along with mappings between it and other systems for describing subjects (such as the English Wikipedia article titles that Forward to Libraries knows how to relate to LCSH) allows researchers to find materials on the same subjects across multiple collections, using common terminology. There are limitations to relying on LCSH for cross-collection subject searches, though. First of all, many libraries, particularly those outside the US, do not use LCSH. Some use other subject vocabularies. If a mapping has been defined between LCSH and another subject vocabulary (as has been done, for example, with MeSH) one can use that mapping to determine search terms to use in libraries that use that subject vocabulary. We don’t yet have that capability in Forward to Libraries, but I’m hoping to add it eventually. Changing the subjects I’m now also seeing more libraries that use LCSH, but that also use different terms for certain subjects that they find more appropriate for their users. While there is a process for updating LCSH terms (and its terms get updated on a monthly basis) the process can be slow, hard for non-specialists to participate in, and contentious, particularly for larger-scale subject heading changes. It can also be subject to pressure by non-librarians. The Library of Congress ultimately answers to Congress (as its name suggests), and members of Congress have used funding bills to block changes in subject headings that the librarian-run process had approved. They did that in 2016 for the subject heading “Illegal aliens”, where librarians had recommended using other terms to cover subjects related to unauthorized immigration. The documentary film “Change the Subject” (linked with context in this article) has a detailed report on this controversy. Four years after the immigration subject changes were blocked, some libraries have decided not to wait for LCSH to change, and are introducing their own subject terms. The University of Colorado Boulder, for example, announced in 2018 that they would use the term “Undocumented immigrants” where the Library of Congress had “Illegal aliens”. Other libraries have recently announced similar changes. Some library consortia have organized systematic programs to supersede outdated and offensive terms in LCSH in their catalogs. Some groups now maintain specialized subject vocabularies that can both supplement and supersede LCSH terms, such as Homosaurus for LGBT+-related subjects. And there’s also been increasing interest in using subject terms and classifications adapted to local communities. For instance, the Brian Deer Classification System is intended to be both used and shaped by local indigenous communities, and therefore libraries in different locations that use it may well use different terms for some subjects, depending on local usage and interests. Supporting cross-collection search in a community of localized catalogs We can still search across collections that use local terms, as long as we know what those terms are and how to translate between them. Forward to Libraries already uses a data file indicating Wikipedia article titles that correspond closely to LCSH subjects, and vice versa. By extension, we can also create a data file indicating terms to use at a given library that correspond to terms in LCSH and other vocabularies, so we can see what resources are available at different places on a given topics. You can see how that works in practice at The Online Books Page. As I write this, we’re still using the unaltered LCSH subjects (updated to October 2020), so we have a subject page showing free online books on “Illegal aliens”. You can follow links from there to see what other libraries have. If you select the “elsewhere” link in the upper left column and choose the Library of Congress as the library to search, you’ll see what they hold under that subject heading. But if you instead choose the University of Colorado Boulder, you’ll see what they have under “Undocumented immigrants”, the subject term they’ve adopted there. Similar routing happens from Wikipedia. The closest related Wikipedia article at present is “Illegal immigration”, and if you go down to the Further Reading section and select links in the Library Resources box, selecting “Online books” or most libraries will currently take you to their “Illegal aliens” subject search. But selecting University of Colorado Boulder (from “Resources in other libraries” if you don’t already have it specified as your preferred library in Wikipedia) will take you to their “Undocumented immigrants” search. This routing applies two mappings, one from Wikipedia terms to LCSH terms, and another from LCSH terms to local library terms. A common data resource These sorts of transformations are fundamentally data-driven. My Forward to Libraries Github repository now includes a data file listing local subject terms that different libraries use, and how they relate to LCSH subject terms. (The library codes used in the file are the same ones that are used in my libraries data file, and are based on OCLC and/or ISIL identifiers.) The local subject terms file is very short for now– as I write this, it only has enough data for the examples I’ve described above, but I’ll be adding more data shortly for other libraries that have announced and implemented subject headings changes. (And I’ll be glad to hear about more so I can add them.) As with other data in this repository, the data in this file is CC0, so it can be used by anyone for any purpose. In particular, it could be be used by services other than my Forward to Libraries tool, such as by aggregated catalogs that incorporate data from multiple libraries, some of which might use localized subject terms that have LCSH analogues. Where to go next What I’ve shown so far is not far removed from a proof-of-concept demo, but I hope it suggests ways that services can be developed to support searches among and across library collections with diverse subject headings. As I mentioned, I’ll be adding more data on localized subject headings as I hear about it, as well as adding more functionality to the Forward to Libraries service (such as the ability to link from a collection with localized subject headings, so I can support them in The Online Books Page, or in other libraries that have such headings and want to use to the service). There are some extensions that could be done to the basic data model to support scaling up these sorts of localizations, such as customizations used by all the libraries in a given consortium, or ones that adopt wholesale an alternative set of subjects, whether that be MeSH, Homosaurus, or the subject thesaurus of a national library outside the US. Even with data declarations supporting those sorts of “bulk” subject mappings, a universal subject mapping knowledge base could get large over time. I’ve created my own mapping file for my services, and for now I’m happy to grow it as needed and share the data freely. But if there is another suitable mapping hub already available or in the works, I’m happy to consider using that instead. It’s important to support exploration across a community of diverse libraries with a diverse array of subject terms and descriptions. I hope the tools and data I’ve described here will help advance us towards that goal, and that I can help grow them from their current nascent state to make them more broadly useful. Posted in discovery, metadata, subjects, wikipedia | Leave a comment Everybody’s Library Questions: Finding films in the public domain Posted on March 30, 2020 by John Mark Ockerbloom Welcome to another installment of Everybody’s Library Questions, where I give answers to questions people ask me (in comments or email) that seem to be useful for general consumption. Before I start, though, I want to put in a plug for your local librarians.  Even though many library buildings are closed now (as they should be) while we’re trying to get propagation and treatment for COVID-19 under control, many of those libraries offer online services, including interactive online help from librarians. (Many of our libraries are also expanding the scope and hours of these services during this health crisis.)   Your local librarians will have the best knowledge of what’s available to you, can find out more about your needs when they talk to you, and will usually be able to respond to questions faster than I or other specific folks on the Internet can. Check out your favorite library’s website, and look for links like “get help” or “online chat” and see what they offer. OK, now here’s the question, extracted from a comment made by Nicholas Escobar to a recent post: I am currently studying at the University of Edinburgh getting masters degree in film composition. For my final project I am required to score a 15 minute film. I was thinking of picking a short silent film (any genre) in the public domain that is 15 minutes (or very close to that length) and was wondering if you had any suggestions? There are three questions implied by this one: First, how do you find out what films exist that meet your content criteria?  Second, how do you find out whether films in that set are in the public domain?  Finally, how can you get access to a film so you can do things with it (such as write a score for it)? There are a few ways you can come up with films to consider.  One is to ask your local librarian (see above) or professor to recommend reference works or data sources that feature short films.  (Information about feature films, which run longer, are often easier to find, but there’s a fair bit out there as well on short films.)  Another is to search some of the reference works and online data sources I’ll mention in the other answers below. The answer to the copyright question depends on where you are.  In the United States, there are basically three categories of public domain films: First, there are films copyrighted before 1925.  All such films’ copyrights have now expired in the US.  This covers most, but not all, of the commercial silent-film era; once The Jazz Singer came out in 1927, movie studies quickly switched to films with sound. Second, there are US films that entered the public domain because they did not take the steps required to secure or maintain their copyrights.  Researching whether this has occurred with a particular film can be complicated, but because there’s been so much interest in cinema history, others have already researched the copyright history of many US films.  The Wikipedia article “List of films in the public domain in the United States” cites a number of reference sources you can check for the status of various films.  (It also lists specific films believed to be in the public domain, but you should check sources cited in the article for those films, and not just take the word of what could be a random Internet user before relying on that information.) Third, there are films created in their entirety by the US government.  There’s a surprisingly large number of these, in various genres and lengths, with tens of thousands or more digitized in the Internet Archive’s United States Government film collection or listed in the National Archives catalog.  You can do lots of things with works of the United States government, which are generally not subject to copyright. That’s the situation in the United States, at least.  However, if you’re not in the United States, different rules may apply.  In Edinburgh and elsewhere in the United Kingdom (and in most of the rest of Europe), works are generally copyrighted until the end of the 70th year after the death of the last author.  In the UK, the authors of a film are considered to be the principal director, the screenwriter(s), and the composer(s).  (For more specifics, see the relevant portion of UK law.)  However, some countries will also let the copyrights of foreign works expire when they do in their country of origin, and in those a US film that’s in the public domain in the US would also be public domain in those countries.  As you can see in the UK law section I link to, the UK does apply such a “rule of the shorter term” to films from outside the European Economic Area (EEA), if none of the authors are EEA nationals.  So you might be good to go in the UK with many, but not all, US films that are public domain in the US.  (I’m not a UK copyright expert, though; you might want to talk to one to be sure.) Let’s suppose you’ve come up with some suitable possible films, either ones that are in the public domain, ones that have suitable Creative Commons licenses or you can otherwise get permission to score, or ones that are in-copyright but that you could score in the context of a study project, even if you couldn’t publish the resulting audiovisual work.  (Educational fair use is a thing, though its scope also varies from country to country.  Here a guide from the British Library on how it works in the UK.)  We then move on to the last question: How do you get hold of a copy so you can write a score for it? The answer to that question depends on your situation.  Right now, the situation for many of us is that we’re stuck at home, and can’t visit libraries or archives in person.  (And our ability to get physical items like DVDs or videotapes may be limited too.)  So for now, you may be limited to films you can obtain online.  There are various free sources of public domain films: I’ve already mentioned the Internet Archive, whose moving image archive includes many films that are in the public domain (and many that are not, so check rights before choosing one to score).  The Library of Congress also offers more than 2,000 compilations and individual films free to all online.  And your local library may well offer more, as digital video, or as physical recordings (if you can still obtain those).  A number of streaming services that libraries or individuals can subscribe to offer films in the public domain that you can free free to set to music.  Check with your librarian or browse the collection of your favorite streaming service. I’m not an expert in films myself.  Folks reading this who know more, or have more suggestions, should feel free to add comments to this post while comments are open.  In general, the first librarians you talk to won’t usually be experts about the questions you ask.  But even when we can’t give definitive answers on our own, we’re good at sending researchers in productive directions, whether that’s to useful research and reference sources, or to more knowledgeable people.  I hope you’ll take advantage of your librarians’ help, especially during this health crisis.  And, for my questioner and other folks who are interested in scoring or otherwise building on public domain films, I’ll be very interested in hearing about the new works you produce from them.   Posted in copyright, publicdomain, Questions | Leave a comment Build a better registry: My intended comments to the Library of Congress on the next Register of Copyrights Posted on March 19, 2020 by John Mark Ockerbloom The Library of Congress is seeking public input on abilities and priorities desired for the next Register of Copyrights, who heads the Copyright Office, a department within the Library of Congress.  The deadline for comments as I write this is March 20, though I’m currently having trouble getting the form to accept my input, and operations at the Library, like many other places, are in flux due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Below I reproduce the main portion of the comments I’m hoping to get in before the deadline, in the hope that they will be useful for both them and others interested in copyright.  I’ve added a few hyperlinks for context. At root, the Register of Copyrights needs to do the job the position title implies: Build and maintain an effective copyright registry. A well designed, up-to-date digital registry should make it easy for rightsholders to register, and for the public to use registration information. Using today’s copyright registry involves outdated, cumbersome, and costly technologies and practices. Much copyright data is not online, and the usability of what is online is limited. The Library of Congress is now redesigning its catalogs for linked data and modern interfaces. Its Copyright Office thus also has an opportunity to build a modern copyright registry linked to Library databases and to the world, with compatible linked data technologies, robust APIs, and free open bulk downloads. The Copyright Office’s registry and the Library of Congress’s bibliographic and authority knowledge bases could share data, using global identifiers to name and describe entities they both cover, including publications, works, creators, rightsholders, publishers, serials and other aggregations, registrations, relationships, and transactions. The Copyright Office need not convert wholesale to BIBFRAME, or to other Library-specific systems. It simply needs to create and support identifiers for semantic entities described in the registry (“things, not strings“), associate data with them, and exchange data in standard formats with the Library of Congress catalog and other knowledge bases. As a comprehensive US registry for creative works of all types, the Copyright Office is uniquely positioned to manage such data. The Deep Backfile project at the University of Pennsylvania (which I maintain) provides one example of uses that can be made of linked copyright data. At is a page showing selected copyrights associated with Collier’s Magazine (1888-1957). It links to online copies of public domain issues, contents and descriptive information from external sources like FictionMags, Wikidata, and Wikipedia, and rights contact information for some of its authors. The information shown has no rights restrictions, and can be used by humans and machines. JSON files, and the entire Deep Backfile knowledge base, are available from this page and from Github. It is not the Copyright Office’s job to produce applications like these. But it can provide data that powers them. Much of our Deep Backfile data was copied manually from scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries pages, and from online catalogs lacking easily exported or linked data. The Copyright Office and the Library of Congress could instead produce such data natively (first prospectively, eventually retrospectively). In the process, they could also cross-pollinate each other’s knowledge bases. To implement this vision, the Register needs to understand library standards and linked open data technologies, gather and manage a skilled implementation team, and be sufficiently persuasive, trusted, and organized to bring stakeholders together inside and outside the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress to support and fund a new system’s development. If explained and implemented well, a registry of the sort described here could greatly benefit copyright holders and copyright users alike. The Register of Copyrights should also know copyright law thoroughly, implement sensible regulations required by copyright law and policy, and be a trusted and inclusive expert that rightsholders, users, and policymakers can consult. I expect other commenters to go into more detail about these skills, which are also useful in building a trustworthy registry of the sort I describe. But the Copyright Office is long overdue to be led by a Register who can revitalize its defining purpose: Register copyrights, in up-to-date, scalable, and flexible ways that encourage wide use of the creations they cover, and thus promote the progress of science and useful arts. Update, March 20: As of the late afternoon on the day of the deadline, the form appears to be still rejecting my submission, without a clear error message.  It did, however, accept a very short submission without any attachment, and with a URL pointing here.  So below I include the rest of my intended comment, listing 3 top priorities. (The essay above was for the longer comment asked for about knowledge, skills, and abilities.) These priorities largely restate in summary form what I wrote above.   If anyone else reading this was unable to post their full comment by the deadline due to technical difficulties, you can try emailing something to me (or leaving a comment to this post) and posting a simple comment to that effect on the LC site, and I’ll do my best to get your full comment posted on this blog. Priority #1: Make copyright registration data easy to use: Data should be easy to search, consult, and analyze, individually and in bulk, by people and machines, linked with the Library of Congress’s rich bibliographic data, facilitating verification of copyright ownership, licensing from rightsholders, and cataloging and analysis by libraries, publishers, vendors, and researchers. Priority #2: Make effective copyright registration easy to do: Ensure copyright registration is simple, inexpensive, supports a variety of electronic and physical deposits, and where possible supports persistent, addressible identifiers and accompanying data for semantic entities described in registrations, and their relationships. Priority #3: Be a trusted, inclusive resource for understanding copyright and its uses: Creators, publishers, consumers, and policymakers all are concerned with copyright, and with possible reforms. The Register should help all understand their rights, and provide expert and impartial advice and mediation for diverse copyright stakeholders and policymaking priorities. Other factors: The Register of Copyrights should also be capable of creating, implementing, and keeping up to date appropriate regulations and practices required or implied by Congressional statutes.  (For the “additional comments” attachment, I had a static PDF attachment showing the Collier’s web page linked from my main essay, as it was on March 19.)   Posted in copyright, data, metadata, open access, serials | Leave a comment Welcome to everybody’s online libraries Posted on March 16, 2020 by John Mark Ockerbloom As coronavirus infections spread throughout the world, lots of people are staying home to slow down the spread and save lives.  In the US, many universities, schools, and libraries have closed their doors.  (Here’s what happening at the library where I work, which as I write this has closed all its buildings.)  But lots of people are still looking for information, to continue studies online, or just to find something good to read. Libraries are stepping up to provide these things online.  Many libraries have provided online information for years, through our own websites, electronic resources that we license, create, or link to, and other online services.  During this crisis, as our primary forms of interaction move online, many of us will be working hard to meet increased demand for digital materials and services (even as many library workers also have to cope with increased demands and stresses on their personal lives). Services are likely to be in flux for a while.  I have a few suggestions for the near term: Check your libraries’ web sites regularly. They should tell you whether the libraries are now physically open or closed (many are closed now, for good reason), and what services the library is currently offering.  Those might change over time, sometimes quickly.  Our main library location at Penn, for instance, was declared closed indefinitely last night, less than 12 hours before it was next due to reopen.   On the other hand, some digitally mediated library services and resources might not be available initially, but then become available after we have safe and workable procedures set up for them and sufficient staffing.    Many library web sites also prominently feature their most useful electronic resources and services, and have extensive collections of electronic resources in their catalogs or online directories.  They may be acquiring more electronic resources to meet increased user demand for online content. Some providers are also increasing what they offer to their library customers during the crisis, and sometimes making some of their material free for all to access. If  you need particular things from your library during this crisis, reach out to them using the contact information given on their website.  When libraries know what their users need, they can often make those needs a priority, and can let you know if and when they can provide them. Check out other free online library services.    I run one of them, The Online Books Page, which now lists over 3 million books and serials freely readable online due to their public domain status or the generosity of their rightsholders.   We’ll be adding more material there over the next few weeks as we incorporate the listings of more collections, and respond to your requests.  There are many other services online as well.   Wikipedia serves not only as a crowd-sourced collection of articles on millions of topics, but also as a directory of further online resources related to those topics.   And the Internet Archive also offers access millions of books and other information resources no longer readily commercially available, many through controlled digital lending and other manifestations of fair use.  (While the limits of fair use are often subject to debate, library copyright specialists make a good case that its bounds tend to increase during emergencies like this one.  See also Kyle Courtney’s blog for more discussion of useful things libraries can do in a health crisis with their copyright powers.) Support the people who provide the informative and creative resources you value.  The current health crisis has also triggered an economic crisis that will make life more precarious for many creators.  If you have funds you can spare, send some of them their way so they can keep making and publishing the content you value.  Humble Bundles, for instance, offer affordable packages of ebooks, games, and other online content you can enjoy while you’re staying home, and pay for to support their authors, publishers, and associated charities.  (I recently bought their Tachyon SF bundle with that in mind; it’s on offer for two more weeks as I write this.)  Check the websites of your favorite authors and artists to see if they offer ways to sponsor their work, or specific projects they’re planning.  Buy books from your favorite independent booksellers (and if they’re closed now, check their website or call them to see if you can buy gift cards to keep them afloat now and redeem them for books later on).  Pay for journalism you value.  Support funding robust libraries in your community. Consider ways you can help build up online libraries.  Many research papers on COVID-19 and related topics have been opened to free access by their authors or publishers since the crisis began.  Increasing numbers of scholarly and other works are also being made open access, especially by those who have already been paid for creating them.   If you’re interested in sharing your work more broadly, and want to learn more about how you can secure rights to do so, the Authors’ Alliance has some useful resources. As libraries shift focus from in-person to online service, some librarians may be busy with new tasks, while others may be left hanging until new plans and procedures get put into motion.  If you’re in the latter category, and want something to do, there are various library-related projects you can work on or learn about.  One that I’m running is the deep backfile project to identify serial issues that are in the public domain in less-than-obvious ways, and to find or create free digital copies of these serials (so that, among other things, people who are stuck at home can read them online).  I’ve recently augmented my list of serial backfiles to research to include serials held by the library in which I work, in the hopes that we could eventually find or produce digital surrogates for some of them that our readers (and anyone else interested) could access from afar.  I can also add sets for other libraries; if you’re interested in one for yours, let me know and I can go into more detail about the data I’m looking for.  (I’m not too worried about creating too many serial sets to research, especially since once information about a serial is added into one of the serial sets, it also gets automatically added into any other sets that include that serial.) Take care of yourself, and your loved ones.  Whether you work in libraries of just use them, this is a stressful time.  Give yourself and those around you room and resources to cope, as we disengage from much of our previous activities, and deal with new responsibilities and concerns.  I’m gratified to see the response of the Wikimedia Foundation, for instance, which is committed both to keeping the world well-informed and up-to-date through Wikipedia and related projects, and also to letting its staff and contractors work half-time for the same pay during the crisis, and waiving sick-day limits. Among new online community support initiatives, I’m also pleased to see librarian-created resources like the Ontario Library Association’s pandemic information brief, with useful information for library users and workers, and the COVID4GLAM Discord community, a discussion space to support the professional and personal needs of people working in libraries, archives, galleries and museums. These will be difficult times ahead.  Our libraries can make a difference online, even as our doors are closed.  I hope you’ll be able to put them to good use.   Posted in libraries, online books, open access | 4 Comments Public Domain Day 2020: Coming Around Again Posted on January 1, 2020 by John Mark Ockerbloom I’m very happy for 2020 to be arriving.  As the start of the 2020s, it represents a new decade in which we can have a fresh start, and hope to make better decisions and have better outcomes than some of what we’ve gone through in recent years.  And I’m also excited to have a full year’s worth of copyrighted works entering the public domain in much of the world, including in the US for the second year in a row after a 20-year public domain freeze. Outside the US, in countries that still use the Berne Convention‘s “life plus 50 years” copyright terms, works by authors who died in 1969 are now in the public domain.  (Such countries include Canada, New Zealand, and a number of other countries mostly in Asia and Africa.)  Many other countries, including most European countries, have extended copyright terms to life of the author(s) plus 70 years, often under pressure from the United States or the European Union.  In those countries, works by authors who died in 1949 are now in the public domain.  The Public Domain Review has a “class of 2020” post featuring some of these authors, along with links to lists of other people who died in the relevant years. In the US, nearly all remaining copyrights from 1924 have now expired, just as copyrights from 1923 expired at the start of last year.  (The exceptions are sound recordings, which will still be under copyright for a little while longer.   But thanks to recent changes in copyright law, those too will join the public domain soon instead of remaining indefinitely in state copyright.)  I discussed some of the works joining the public domain in a series of blog posts last month, in the last one linking to some posts by others that mentioned new public domain arrivals from 1924.  But I’m happy not just because of these specific works, but also because new arrivals to the US public domain are now an annual event, and not just something that happens with published works at rare intervals.  I could get used to this. It isn’t all good news this year.  The most recent draft of the intellectual property chapter of the US-Canada-Mexico trade agreement requires Canada to extend its copyrights another 20 years, making it freeze its public domain not long after we’ve unfrozen our own in the US.  But the agreement hasn’t yet been ratified, and could conceivably still be changed or rejected.  And the continued force of copyrights from the second half of the previous ’20s while we’re entering a new set of ’20s is a reminder that US copyright terms remain overlong; so long, in fact, that many works from that era are lost or severely deteriorated before their copyrights expire. But there’s now an annual checklist of things to do for me and for many other library organizations.  For me, some of the things to do for The Online Books Page include: Updating our documentation on what’s public domain  (done) and on what versions of our site are public domain (also done; as in previous years, I’m dedicating to the public domain works that I wrote whose copyrights I control that are were published more than 14 years ago.  This year that includes the 2005 copyrights to The Online Books Page.) Removing the “no US access” notices from 1924 books I’d linked to at non-US sites, when I couldn’t previously establish that they were public domain here; and removing “US access only” notices for 1879 volumes at HathiTrust, which over the next few days will be making 140-year-old volumes globally accessible without requiring author-death-date review.   (This and other activities below will start tomorrow and continue until done.) Updating our list of first active renewals for serials and our “Determining copyright status of serial issues” decision guide to reflect the expiration of 1924’s copyrights.  As part of this process, I’ll be deleting all the 1924 serial issue and contribution renewals currently recorded in our serials knowledge base, since they’re no longer in force.  If anyone wants to know what they were for historical or other analytical purposes, I have a zipped collection of all our serial renewals records as of the end of 2019, available on request.  They can also be found in the January 1, 2020 commit of this Github directory. Adding newly opened or scanned 1924 books to our listings, through our automated OAI harvests of selected digital collections, readers’ suggestions and requests, surveys of prize winners and other relevant collections, and our own bibliographer selections. All of this is work I’m glad to be doing this year, and hope to be doing more in the years to come.  (And I’m already streamlining our processes to make it easier to do in years to come.)  Its the job of libraries to collect and preserve works of knowledge and creativity and make them easy for people to discover, access, and use.  It’s also our job to empower our users to draw on those works to make new ones.  As the public domain grows, we can freely collect and widely share more works, and our users can likewise build on and reuse more public domain works in their own creations. Supporting the public domain, then, is supporting the work and mission of libraries.  I therefore hope that all libraries and their users will support a robust public domain, and have more works to celebrate and work with every year.  Happy Public Domain Day!       Posted in publicdomain | Leave a comment 2020 vision #5: Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin Posted on December 31, 2019 by John Mark Ockerbloom It’s only a few hours from the new year where I write this, but before I ring in the new year, and a new year’s worth of public domain material, I’d like to put in a request for what music to ring it in with: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which joins the public domain in the US as the clock strikes twelve, over 95 years after it was first performed. The unofficial song for Public Domain Day 2019 turned out to be “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, one of the members of the first big class of US public domain works in the last 20 years.  That’s a fun novelty song, and certainly memorable, but not something I necessarily want to hear a lot.  In contrast, for me Rhapsody in Blue has a freshness that makes it a joy for me to hear repeatedly, right from the opening clarinet glissando (apparently the idea of clarinetist Ross Gorman, who took the scale that Gershwin had composed for the piece and gave it the bendy, slidy wail that tells you right away that this is no ordinary concert piece).  It’s brought together classical, popular, high-art and everyday music, as it’s been played and recorded countless times by jazz bands (the original scoring is for jazz band and piano), symphony orchestras, and pop musicans like Billy Joel.  Even its licensing as an theme tune for an airline hasn’t diminished it. There’s lots of other work joining the public domain along with Gershwin’s tune.  I’ve only had a chance to mention a few others in my short series, but others have mentioned more works you may find of interest. At the Internet Archive’s blog, Elizabeth Townsend Gard writes about Vera Brittain’s Not without Honour and other 1924 works that will be in the public domain very soon.  Duke’s Public Domain Day 2020 post mentions various books, films, and musical compositions joining the public domain as well (and has more to say on Rhapsody in Blue).  Wikipedia’s various 1924 articles also mention various works that will either be joining the public domain, or becoming more clearly established there.  And Hathitrust will begin opening access to tens of thousands of scanned volumes from 1924 over the next few days. I’ll have more to say on the new arrivals tomorrow, sometime after the midnight bells chime.  By tradition, the first tune played in the New Year is usually the public domain song “Auld Lang Syne”.  But after that, at your new years’ party or at a later Public Domain celebration, you might enjoy hearing or playing Gershwin’s new arrival in the public domain.     Posted in publicdomain | Leave a comment 2020 vision #4: Ding Dong Merrily on High by George Ratcliffe Woodward and others Posted on December 19, 2019 by John Mark Ockerbloom It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas everywhere I go.  The library where I work had its holiday party earlier this week, where I joined librarian colleagues singing Christmas, Hanukkah, and winter-themed songs in a pick-up chorus.  Radio stations and shopping centers play a familiar rotation of popular seasonal songs whose biggest hits are from a surprisingly narrow date range centered in the 1950s.  And more traditional familiar Christmas carols, hymns, and songs are being sung and played in concert halls and churches well into January. The more “classic” Christmas music often feels timeless to those of us singing and hearing it.  But while their roots often go back far, the form in which we know them is often much newer that we might think.  Notice how the list in the previous link, for instance, includes “Carol of the Bells”, dated 1936.  That’s when it was first published as a Christmas song, one that’s still under copyright.  Its roots are older, and darker, as is made clear in a recent Slate article well worth reading. As noted there, the melody is based on a Ukrainian folk tune (date unknown), its full musical setting composed by Mykola Leontovych (assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1921), and Christmas-themed lyrics written by the Ukrainian-descended American musician Peter Wilhousky (who lived until 1978). While “Carol of the Bells” still has a number of years left to go on its copyright, another classic Christmas carol will most likely be joining the public domain in the US in just under two weeks.  Like Carol of the Bells, “Ding Dong Merrily on High” is based on a folk tune, in this case a secular dance tune first published in France in the 16th century under the title “Branle de l’Official”.  In 1924, George Ratcliffe Woodward, an English cleric already known for publishing collections of old songs, wrote lyrics for the tune recalling earlier ages, and included them in the Cambridge Carol-Book, published that year by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Charles Wood, who’d collaborated with Woodward on the earlier Cowley Carol Book,  wrote a harmonization to go with it.  While you won’t hear it at every Christmas service, it remains widely sung this time of year.  That’s in large part because it’s so much fun to sing, with its dance-like rhythms, its long bell-like vocal runs on “Gloria” (something also heard in “Angels We Have Heard on High“), and its praise of various forms of music (musicians liking to hear good things about themselves as much as anyone else). I don’t actually know for sure that “Ding Dong Merrily on High” is still under copyright here.  I have not found a 1951 or 1952 copyright renewal for the song or the book it was published in, but I’m assuming that, if nothing else, GATT restoration retroactively secured and automatically renewed a 1924 US copyright for the song as published in the Cambridge Carol-Book.  (Folks with more knowledge or legal expertise are free to correct me on that.)  Later published arrangements of the song may continue to have active copyrights, but only for material original to those arrangements.  1924’s remaining copyrights, on the other hand, all end in the US on January 1.   (And since Woodward and Wood both died over 70 years ago, the song’s already public domain in most other countries.) The arrival of 2020, then, should at least clear up any ambiguity about the public domain status of the basic carol.  I appreciate that, in part because this song, like many other Christmas carols, lives in a sort of liminal space between the private property regimes set up for copyright holders and the older, more informal understandings of folk culture.  Both kinds of spaces have good reason to exist. On the one hand, it’s good to have more than a few people who can earn a living through music, and one important way many musicians do so is by controlling rights to their compositions.  On the other hand, the folk process, which originally gave rise to the tunes for both “Ding Dong Merrily on High” and “Carol of the Bells”, is also a very good way of creating and passing on shared cultural works. Conflict can rage when two different sets of cultural expectations around creative works try to occupy the same space.  That’s one reason we’ve seen decades of conflict in academia over open access, where scholarly work is largely published by companies that depend on its control and sale to earn money, while it’s largely written by scholars who earn their money in other ways, and tend to prefer free, widespread availability of their work.  Sometimes informal arrangements work best to keep the peace.  Publishers, for instance, have grown more used to free preprint servers, and memes and fan fiction communities have become more widely accepted (and even winning awards) as long as they stay well away from unauthorized commercial exploitation (where both big and small creators tend to draw the line). Sometimes, though, it’s best to have a more formal understanding that works are free for anyone to freely use as we like.  That’s what we’ll have when 1924’s copyrights end, and the works they cover, such as “Ding Dong Merrily on High” are clearly seen to be in the public domain.  And then, those of us who are so inclined can freely sing “hosanna in excelsis!“ Posted in publicdomain | Leave a comment 2020 vision #3: The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell Posted on December 13, 2019 by John Mark Ockerbloom “Be a realist. The world is made up of two classes–the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are hunters.” Sanger Rainsford speaks these words at the start of “The Most Dangerous Game”, one of the most famous short stories of all time. First published in Collier’s magazine in 1924, it’s been reprinted in numerous anthologies, been adapted for radio, TV, and multiple movies, and assigned in countless middle and high school English classes.  The tropes established in the story, in which a hunter finds himself a “huntee”, are so well-established in present-day American culture that there are lengthy TV Tropes pages not just for the story itself, but for the trope named by its title. Up until now, the story’s been under copyright in the US, as well as in Europe and other countries that have “life plus 70 years” copyright terms.  (The author, Richard Connell,  died just over 70 years ago in 1949, so as of January 1, it will be public domain nearly everywhere in the world.)  Anyone reprinting the story, or explicitly adapting it for drama or art has had to get permission or pay a royalty.  On the other hand, many creators have reused its basic idea– humans being hunted for sport or entertainment– without getting such permission. That’s because ideas themselves are not copyrightable, but rather the expression of those ideas.  And the basic idea long predates this particular story: Consider, for instance, gladiators in Roman arenas, or tributes being hunted down in the Labyrinth by the Minotaur of Greek mythology.  But the particular formulation in Connell’s short story, in which General Zaroff, a former nobleman bored with hunting animals, lures humans to his private island to hunt and kill them for sport, is both distinctively memorable, and copyrightable.  Stray too close to it, or quote too much from the story, and you may find yourself the target of lawyers.  (But perhaps not if you yourself are dangerous enough game.  I don’t know if the makers of “The Incredibles“, which also featured a rich recluse using his wits and inventions to hunt humans on a private island, paid royalties to Connell’s estate, or relied on fair use or arguments about uncopyrightable ideas.  But in any case, Disney is better equipped to either negotiate or defend themselves against infringement lawsuits than others would be.) Rereading the story recently, I’m struck by both how it reflects its time in some ways, and in how its action is surprisingly economical.  In 1924, we were still living in the shadow of the First World War, in which multiple empires and noble houses fell, while others continued but began to teeter.  The deadly spectacles of public executions and lynchings were still not uncommon in the United States.  And the dividing of people into two classes– those who are inherently privileged and those who are left in the cold or even considered fair game– was particularly salient that year, as the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan neared its peak in popularity, and as immigration law was changed to explicitly keep out people of the “wrong” national origin or race.  Those sorts of division haunt our society to this day. Rainsford objects to Zaroff’s dehumanizing game in what we now tend to think of the story’s setup, which actually takes most of the story’s telling.  (The description of the hunt itself is relatively brief, and no words at all are used to describe the final showdown, which implicitly takes place in the gap between the story’s last two sentences.)  In the end, though, Rainsford prevails by beating his opponent at his own game.  He doesn’t want to kill another human being, but when pressed to the extreme, he adopts his opponent’s rules (at the end giving Zaroff the sporting warning “I am still a beast at bay… Get ready”) and proves to be the better killer. With the story entering the public domain in less than three weeks, we’ll have the chance to reuse, adapt, and critique the story in quotation more freely than ever before.  I hope we use the opportunity not just to recapitulate the story, but to go beyond it in new ways. That’s what happens in the best reuses of tropes.  Consider for instance, how in the Hunger Games books, the main character Katniss repeatedly finds ways to subvert the trope of killing others for entertainment.  Instead of prevailing by beating opponents at the deadly human-hunting game the enemy has created, she and her allies find ways to reject the game’s premise, cut it short, or prevent its recurrence. When, in 19 days, we get another year’s worth of public domain works, I hope we too find ways not just to revisit what’s come before, but make new and better work out of them.  That’s something that the public domain allows everyone, and not just members of some privileged class, to do.           Posted in publicdomain 2020 vision #2: When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne Posted on December 5, 2019 by John Mark Ockerbloom I mentioned in my previous post that I was looking forward to works entering the public domain in the US as a routine annual event. This coming January 1, we’ll have the second large expiration of copyrights in the US since 1998 (the first being the most recent January 1).  I’ve sometimes heard cynicism expressed that this would ever happen. Some public domain fans will tell you that Disney had been responsible for preventing valuable characters like Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain for decades, and that they’ll force more copyright extensions through before his copyright is scheduled to expire in a few years. Personally, I think that’s a myth that makes despair too easy.  While Disney has indeed been one of the companies that has lobbied for longer copyrights, they’re far from the only group that has done so, and their role is often exaggerated relative to other entertainment and publishing industry groups.  Moreover, copyrights to some of their most profitable characters are already starting to expire, and  so far they have neither pushed hard to extend them, nor to my knowledge seen a loss in their profitably. I’m referring here to the A. A. Milne characters that Disney now owns (after some earlier legal battles were resolved): Winnie-the-Pooh, and his friends Christopher Robin, Piglet, Owl, and the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood.  By some accounts they are as profitable as Mickey, possibly more so.  And they probably will remain profitable even as their copyrights end. Christopher Robin’s first published appearance as a character, for instance, was in the poem “Vespers” (whose most famous line is “Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”). It appeared in the January 1923 issue of Vanity Fair, and is already in the public domain in the US, as of the start of this year.  Beginning in January 1924, Milne published more children’s poems featuring Christopher Robin and others in Punch, which were republished later in the year in the book When We Were Very Young.  That book was an international best-seller, and along with the later book Winnie-the-Pooh, it launched Milne, his son, and his stuffed toys to worldwide fame and fortune (which, as I noted in last year’s post on Milne’s Success, was at best a mixed blessing for them.) I find When We Were Very Young a delightful book.  Like its successors, it isn’t straight-up nostalgic whimsy, but has a gently wry sensibility that parents may notice more readily than their children do.  Along with “Vespers”, some of the other verses (like the ones about changing guards at Buckingham Palace, and the king who likes “a little bit of butter in my bread”) are still well-known.  But the book is significant not just for the text, which is already in the public domain in some other countries with terms less than “life plus 70 years”, but for Ernest Shepard’s illustrations for the book, which will be joining the public domain in the US along with Milne’s poems.  Those include recognizable likenesses not just of Christopher Robin, but of a certain bear that appears a few times, including in the upper left of the book’s cover: (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; they and I consider this low-resolution image fair use in our respective contexts.) The bear doesn’t yet have the name “Winnie-the-Pooh”.   In this book he’s just called “Teddy Bear”, or more formally, Mr. “Edward Bear” (a name also used in his later book).  His appearance, as established in this book, joins the public domain next month.   The year after that, it will be joined by his “Pooh” name and his first prose story (“The Wrong Sort of Bees”, published in London’s Evening News at Christmastime 1925).  The following year, most of the rest of Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood friends will join the public domain, along with the book Winnie-the-Pooh (which includes Pooh’s bee story as its first chapter). Tigger, who bounced into print two years later in The House at Pooh Corner, will be the last of the major Milne characters to join the public domain, the same year as we can expect Mickey Mouse’s first copyrights to expire in the US. But Disney will still have be able to profit substantially from its rights to Pooh (and Mickey).  After all, the Winnie-the-Pooh cartoons and movies they made came later, and their copyrights still have decades left on them.  Disney’s likenesses of Pooh and his friends also differ substantially from Shepard’s, and will therefore also be under copyright for many more years. Moreover, much of the revenue Disney gets from these characters is not from their stories or cartoons, but from the merchandise associated with them– clothing, housewares, toys, and the like.  Those can be protected by trademark, and unlike copyrights, trademarks for various kinds of goods and services do not expire as long as their owners keep using them along similar lines.  (For example, while the character Peter Pan is no longer copyrighted in most countries, trademarks restrict using him to promote things like peanut butter and bus transportation to his current licensees.) Someone who wants to reuse Christopher Robin, Pooh, and Mickey Mouse in creative works after their copyrights expire might still need to be careful about how they promote that work.  But courts have made it clear in cases like Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox that trademark cannot be used to create a de-facto perpetual copyright.  I expect that over the next few years we’ll see some legal skirmishing over where to draw the line between unrestricted creativity and restricted merchandising, for Disney’s characters now entering the public domain.  (We’ve seen similar conflicts over Tarzan in the past, even as many of his stories have long been in the public domain and freely available online.) Personally, I’m content if Winnie-the-Pooh-branded bedsheets and bubble bath remain Disney’s domain, as long as readers can freely enjoy Milne’s stories and Shepard’s drawings, and writers and artists can adapt them into new stories, scenes, and objects (and promote those new works within reasonable guidelines).  I’m hoping we’ll keep getting new arrivals to the public domain every year, from 1924 in January, then 1925 next year, and so on. And I’m hopeful that we will, as long as so many of us appreciate and make clear the value of a growing public domain, that those who might otherwise try to extend copyright further can’t ignore us. Posted in publicdomain 2020 vision #1: Opportunity Posted on December 2, 2019 by John Mark Ockerbloom In just thirty days from when this post appears, a new crop of works will join the public domain. Exactly what will come out of copyright will vary by country.  In Europe and other places with “life+70 years” copyright terms, works by authors who died in 1949 will join the public domain on January 1, 2020.  In countries that still have “life+50 years” terms, works by authors who died in 1969 will.  And in the United States, copyrights that were secured in 1924 that are still in force will expire. As an American, I’m especially excited about the works in that last set.  For most of the 21st century to date, almost nothing entered the public domain in the US, after a 1998 law extended copyright terms by 20 years.  Then last year, all copyrights still active from 1923 expired, and we finally had a Public Domain Day here with lots of new published works that many people noted and celebrated.  And it looks like we’re going to get another big set of works from 1924 in the public domain next month. Last year, I was so excited about the coming of the first substantial Public Domain Day here in a long time that I wrote advent calendar posts every day in December, discussing 31 works from 1923 that would (and did!) join the public domain in 2019.  It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. I thought it worth the effort, though, to note such a big change in the copyright environment we’d grown accustomed to.  But I wasn’t planning to do all that work again this year. A few thing, though, have made me reconsider, at least in part.   One of them was an article I saw today about a new collection of stories by Zora Neale Hurston being published in early 2020, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.  Now recognized as a major 20th century American writer, Hurston published works in a variety of genres and forums from the 1920s through the 1950s.  However, she was not well known outside of African American and literary scholarship circles until the 1970s, when Alice Walker wrote an article in Ms. Magazine in appreciation of her work, and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was reprinted and became a best-seller. Hurston’s new collection brings back into print a number of her early short stories, which the publisher’s blurb describes as “lost” and “in forgotten periodicals and archives”.  My first thought on reading the blurb was to be annoyed about the erasure of the librarians and archivists who collected, cataloged, and preserved those publications and thereby ensured that they were not, in fact, lost or forgotten.  But then, on further reflection, I realized that for much of the general public, they might as well have been lost, since many people do not have easy access to the libraries and archives that hold them. One of Hurston’s early stories, “Drenched in Light”, appeared in the December 1924 issue of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, which published a variety of articles, stories, poems, studies, and art by African Americans.  The journal began in 1923, and HathiTrust opened access to its first volume on Public Domain Day at the start of this year.  My listing for the journal also includes some later volumes of the magazine, since as it turns out, the publishers did not renew copyrights for issues prior to the 1940s.  (Most of its authors didn’t renew their contributions either, as you can see in the full set of renewals we’ve found for Opportunity.)  My listings do not yet, however, include the 1924 volume.  HathiTrust has a scan of it, but neither they nor anyone else has yet opened access to it, presumably because no one with a scan feels confident enough about its rights status to do so yet.  I expect it to become visible in 30 days, when 1924’s remaining copyrights expire in the US and HathiTrust opens its volumes from 1924. Those without access to Opportunity in print might be able to read “Drenched in Light” before then in Hurston’s previously published Complete Stories collection.  But they won’t be able to view the rich context in which it first appeared, from all the other writers and artists who had work published in Opportunity in 1924– even though as I noted in one of last year’s advent calendar entries, many early African-American publications, including many of Hurston’s stories, did not get renewed copyrights. Between now and Public Domain Day 2020, I’ll be posting on works published in 1924, both the famous and the obscure, that I look forward to coming into clearer view in the new year.  Some will be joining the public domain on January 1.  Some, like the 1924 Opportunity issues, are already in the public domain, but are not as widely accessible as they could be.  (Though many of them can be found in my library, and perhaps in yours.)  I won’t write a post every day, but I hope to publish a fair number on a variety of works by the new year.  You’re welcome to participate, either directly, such as by suggesting works or contributing comments, or indirectly, such as by contributing further information about what’s in the public domain or soon will be.  (Our copyright information for Opportunity, for instance, is part of Penn’s serials copyright knowledge base that you can add to.) I hope Public Domain Day will be an annual cause for celebration in the United States and elsewhere.  I want new arrivals to the public domain to become routine, but not taken for granted, lest the public domain be frozen again as it was for far too many years.  I hope this series of posts, and other work being done by libraries, readers, and fans of the public domain worldwide, help us recognize the treasures of the public domain and bring more of them to light. 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