Large-Scale Book and Journal Digitization Projects and Interlibrary Service: Opening the Discussion

Large-scale library-based book scanning and metadata projects have greatly enlarged the sphere of readily accessible items for scholars, students, independent researchers, and casual readers. These efforts have made large numbers of digital surrogates of items once found only on the shelves of geographically dispersed research libraries universally available to those with access to the Web. Following current U.S. copyright law, the content of these projects is primarily date-determined public domain literature. Copyright law stipulates that all material published in the United States before 1923 is in the public domain. Material published after that date may be in the public domain as well if no copyright notice was included in the publication or if registration of copyright after the initial period of protection was not renewed. Among the several traditional areas of library operations that stand to benefit from these new resources is interlibrary loan service. Instead of deciding whether or not to loan (sometimes rare or fragile) original material, the opportunity to direct both local library users and libraries submitting borrowing requests to the wealth of now-available scanned copies of books and journal articles has the potential to have a significant impact on resource sharing. Legal objections from publishers and authors’ organizations have challenged these scanning efforts since their inception, but court decisions, including the Author’s Guild vs. HathiTrust case, have tended to set strong precedents for their protection under the fair-use provisions of copyright law (Albanese, 2012). The Author’s Guild is undertaking a final push to have