Milestones for the Deep Backfile project | Everybody's Libraries

"Back in 2020 and 2021, while the Penn Libraries were largely closed, many of our librarians worked from home on the Deep Backfile project that I’ve written about here before. Faced with more demand than ever for online access to our collections while most users couldn’t go into our libraries, we researched the copyrights of some of the many thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, and other serials in our collections. We hoped that documenting their public domain status could pave the way to making them more widely available not just to users of our library, but to readers in many other places as well.

By the time our library buildings fully reopened in 2021, our librarians had researched and reported on the copyright status of over 8,000 serials owned by Penn. They also found free online copies of at least some issues in over 2,000 of those serials. Our plan for the project was to do two reviews of every serial, one based on filling out a questionnaire we developed, and one done by someone with more expertise to review and edit the initially reported data, and to create a linked data record for it.

I’m pleased to announce that that second review is now complete. We now have copyright data for all the serials our librarians worked on now published as JSON linked data, connected with Wikidata, available in bulk on Github, and linked to free online content that our librarians found (via The Online Books Page)..."