Determining Copyright Status for Preservation and Access: Defining Reasonable Effort

Abstract

Alternative procedures were investigated for determining the copyright status of brittle monographs to be scanned as part of the national preservation plan for agricultural sciences literature. Copyright searches were conducted both in Washington in the files of the U.S. Copyright Office and at Cornell University in the printed Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE). Results were compared to determine the most efficient procedure. Search procedures (averaging 7 minutes per title) in the CCE were 97% in agreement overall with the results obtained from considerably more time consuming (13 minutes per title) searching at the Copyright Office. CCE searches were 100% in agreement concerning instances of renewal of copyright. This finding calls into question the assumption that it is necessary to conduct such searches at considerable cost in the complex files of the Copyright Office. The resulting CCE search procedure is suggested as a standard of reasonable effort for copyright searching, which demonstrates a legally responsible reasonable effort to respect the rights of copyright holders while advancing preservation aims and converting carefully selected print materials to build the digital library.