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About this project

This is an unofficial, experimental interface for searching records from the US Copyright Office's Catalog of Copyright Entries digitized by NYPL. You can read about the inception and progress of the project in two blog posts: Unlocking the Record of American Creativity—with Your Help and https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964

Renewals have been searchable for many years thanks to the Copyright Renewals project at Stanford. The digitization of registrations by NYPL allows us to find renewed and unrenewed works with equal ease. Search results in this interface contain registrations with their associated renewals, registrations with no known renewals, as well as renewal entries on their own.

What's in the Data?

This dataset contains registrations from all the book volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1923 to 1969, but not including the “pamphlet” volumes (part 1, group 2) from 1923 to 1953. It contains all renewals from book volumes from 1923 to 1977, including “pamphlet” volumes (from Project Gutenberg transcriptions) and all renewals from all classes of works from 1978 to 1991 (from the Copyright Office database).

Clearly there are many renewal records for items not yet included in the registrations but, in theory, all book renewals should be included here. That said, these search results are far from definitive. The data still requires cleanup (see How to report a problem or error below).

How to report a problem or error

If the problem is with this website and not the data, for instance broken links, server errors, or ideas for improvement, you can submit an issue on Github.

If you find an error in the data please submit in issue via the Github repository for the registrations unless you are certain that problem is in a renewal entry, in which case you can submit an issue via the renewals repository. Data problems may involve simple typos, mistakes in parsing, or missing or mistaken links between registrations and renewals. When reporting data problems, please include the CCEIDs of the entries involved. The CCEID is the string of 32 letters in numbers at the end of each record, such as “be62f40e-6d17-1014-b416-88728c01eda4”.

If you are comfortable with git and editing large XML files, you can also submit a pull request.

Get the Code

Registration and renewal data is in the Public Domain and available from two repositories:

Code for this website is available from its own repository: https://github.com/seanredmond/cce-search-prototype