Testing the HathiTrust Copyright Search Protocol in Germany: A Pilot Project on Procedures and Resources

There are more than 11 million volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The largest group of non-English books almost 600,000 titles is in German. For most of these German works, the copyright status is unknown, which means that only the catalogue records can be made publicly available in the digital library, even if a work has passed into the public domain in Germany and could be made available as a full-text scan. To begin to address this problem, a small pilot project was undertaken by a group of students in the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University (the authors), to investigate potential resources for determination of author death dates for HathiTrust books published in Germany. The authors provide observations on the usefulness of certain resources identified with "diligent search" in recent changes to German copyright law passed in response to a 2012 European Union directive on orphan works. They also discuss additional resources not mentioned in the law that might be useful in conducting such searches. Furthermore, they make recommendations for improvement of the HathiTrust Digital Library search protocol for works published outside the United States, particularly in languages other than English. The project findings will be of interest to policy makers, publishers, librarians and others engaged in efforts to identify digitized books that can be made publicly available in accordance with national and international copyright laws and regulations.