February 2022
Did you celebrate Public Domain Day this year? You likely did and didn’t realize it. Public Domain Day is more commonly known as New Year’s Day. Public Domain Day is a big deal for those of us in the cultural heritage field. Every year, on January 1, new works enter the public domain, and that is cause for a celebration!
Welcome! Glad you could make it. Let's talk about yearbooks (but first, make sure you've reviewed the information provided on the Yearbook page of the Digital Projects Toolkit).
Yearbooks are great, right? Who doesn't love an old yearbook? They are fun and full of information. They also likely contain many images of questionable hair and clothing fashions over the years.
But can yearbooks be digitized and made available online? The fun answer: Sure! The realistic answer: It depends. Digitizing yearbooks and making them accessible, like with other materials, does present challenges. There can be complex issues of copyright and privacy.
April 2021
Concluding our copyright series (for now), this month’s column will focus on copyright and digitization.
March 2021
Continuing with our copyright series, this month, we’ll take a look at free and legal stock images.
February 2021
Happy Belated Public Domain Day (a.k.a. New Year’s Day)! Every new year, the copyright on certain works expires and they enter into the public domain. On January 1, 2021, this consisted of works copyrighted in 1925 (notably including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald).
Speaking of copyright, it has been in the news a lot lately, from the lawsuit against the Internet Archive to the passing of the controversial CASE Act. Also, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) had a milestone this last summer: 150 years of service. According to their website, copyright was “first centralized within the Library of Congress 150 years ago in 1870.” In the September/October 2020 issue of its magazine, the Library of Congress celebrated this anniversary by taking an in-depth look at various aspects of copyright.
Many of these resources and programs are funded under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.