HathiTrust's Copyright Detectives

"An ongoing, grant-funded initiative involving the HathiTrust digital repository has been tracking down previously unknown public-domain materials in the repository's vast collection of scanned works from research libraries across the country....The University of Michigan Library—which alone has deposited more than four million scans to the HathiTrust project—was awarded a $578,955 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant (match: $655,898) in 2008 for a three-year project. Its aim: to go through HathiTrust scans of works published between 1923 and 1963 and determine their copyright status....The project has since expanded to include staff from other institutions, including the University of Minnesota, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—currently about 20 staffers in all. According to Anne Karle-Zenith, the Copyright Review Project Librarian at University of Michigan, the project has checked the status of about 95,000 books so far; of those, more than 52,000—greater than half—have been found to be public domain...."