Posted on September 11, 2019 at 11:01 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Look no further if you’re seeking another reason to love librarians.
The New York Public Library is at the center of a group of libraries, volunteers, and archivists working to identify books that are in the public domain and then digitize them.
Why is this so onerous? Well, you have to essentially prove a negative — that a book's copyright hasn't been renewed — as a recent VICE article explains.
The NYPL has helped speed this part up by digitizing a list of public-domain candidates, but that still leaves the task of confirming their lack of renewal and either convincing the owner of an already digitized version that they can upload it ... or having a volunteer convert it for the first time.
Read more about this admirable and enormous effort to expand the Internet Archive in VICE and learn more about the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg on their websites.
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Categories: Today in Books