Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of "Rights" in Digital Collection Building

"Work by...RLG Research has demonstrated that the composition of the HathiTrust collection is remarkably representative of research library collections....Our data [from HathiTrust] spotlight the likely scope of the public domain and the probable large role of orphans in our bibliographic landscape. The following are some key findings of our preliminary analysis: [1] The percentage of public domain books in the collective collection [of the HathiTrust] —not simply the current 5+ million books, but the collection as it expands— is unlikely to grow to more than 33% of the total number of books we will put online. Using the numbers assembled here, the percentage of public domain materials, not including government documents, will be 28%. [2] The body of orphan works —works whose rights holders we cannot locate— is likely to be extremely large, and perhaps the largest body of materials. If the guesses made here are right, 50% of the volumes will be orphan works....[3] The likely size of the corpus of in-copyright publications for which we are able to identify a known rights holder will be roughly the same size as, or slightly smaller than, the body of public domain materials. Again, using these speculative numbers, they may comprise as little as 22% of the total number of books...."