University of Michigan (University of Michigan Library)

Nearly 500,000 books were published in the United States between 1923 and 1963. Many of these titles are in the public domain, but determining the copyright status of individual books is challenging. If a work is not in the public domain, it cannot be made openly accessible online. The University of Michigan Libraries will continue work that has already investigated and recorded reliable determinations of the copyright status of more than 117,000 U.S. titles published in 1923–1963. More than half these titles were determined to be public domain, and they are now available online. With a new IMLS award, the libraries and their partners will continue making copyright determinations for U.S. titles, and will also begin making reliable copyright status determinations for foreign-published titles, which constitute a significant portion of the scholarly works being digitized in projects such as the HathiTrust. Project partners include the libraries of Baylor University, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, Penn State University, Princeton University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, and the University of Minnesota.