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ISSNDigital preservationIt’s No Secret – Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public Domain
2019/12/19

It’s No Secret – Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public Domain

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Since 2008 the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has been researching hundreds of thousands of books to find ones that are in the public domain and can be opened for view in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Over the past 11 years, 168 people across North America have worked together for a common goal: the ability to share public domain works from US libraries. As of September 2019, the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program has performed copyright reviews on 506,989 US publications; of those, 302,915 (59.7%) have been determined to be in the public domain in the United States. The opening of these works in HathiTrust has brought the total of openly available volumes to 6,540,522. In early January 2020, 40,000+ titles in the 17 million item HathiTrust corpus will be in the public domain in the U.S. with some global access. Thanks to HathiTrust’s 148 member libraries committed to preservation and access of these titles.