Orphan Works Project to Scan Library Books for Online Database

"The University of Michigan Library and several other major academic libraries are partnering with the HathiTrust Digital Library to try and do what Google cannot: develop a searchable library of scanned books, including so-called “orphan works,” from the resources in the libraries’ existing print collections. This Orphan Works Project could result in digital access to millions of out-of-print books, but also runs a risk of violating federal copyright laws. Joining Michigan and the HathiTrust in the Orphan Works Project are the libraries at Cornell, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, and the Universities of Florida, Wisconsin, and California....The Orphan Works Project hopes to avoid [Google-type] copyright problems by relying on copyright’s fair use doctrine, which permits some uses of copyright works without permission for scholarly, research, teaching, and other beneficial purposes. Because all of the participants are non-profit universities, they hope to avoid the commercial use problems that Google faces. In addition, the use of orphan works scanned under the project will initially be restricted to on-campus users only...."