Universities Band Together To Join Orphan Works Project | Cornell University Library News

"Leaders at Cornell, Duke, Emory and Johns Hopkins universities jointly announced today that they would begin making the full text of thousands of “orphan works” in their library collections digitally accessible to students, faculty and researchers at their own institutions....Only books that are identified as orphans through a careful process and also held in print format by the individual institutions will be accessible through the HathiTrust website, and they will only be accessible to members of their respective communities. Just as most academic libraries only allow authorized patrons to check out books from their print collections, so will online access be restricted to users who can authenticate with their university ID and password. However, if a university library is open to the public, visitors will have access through library computers. Even with these access restrictions, the Orphan Works Project will greatly improve access to a large amount of scholarly material that has been digitally unavailable due to copyright concerns...."