Bókasafnið - 01.07.2017, Page 36

36 Bókasafnið
Contact with rightsholders was almost always by telephone,
followed by an e-mail or sometimes a paper letter with a
more detailed explanation. The e-mail or letter included
the necessary permission form, pre-filled out by the writer,
which the rightsholder could sign and return. Rightsholders
were encouraged to send the signed permission form back
to the writer rather than directly to HathiTrust, partly to
avoid errors and partly to keep tabs on the project’s results.
Results
Rightsholders’ response to contact was very positive, as the
table shows. 31 of the 36 rightsholders contacted were fa-
vorable towards the idea of opening access to their works.
Twenty-five of them actually did so. Of course, the writer
made contact only with those rightsholders who he felt
were likely candidates. An 86% favorable response and 69%
success rate shows that a significant pool of authors and
other rightsholders who took part in the project would like
their works to be made available for free. Indeed, the writer
believes that if he had had time to explain the options bet-
ter to the five rightsholders who reacted unfavorably, that
some of them might have changed their stance.
Once a book was opened in HathiTrust, a link to it was cre-
ated in the Icelandic national library catalogue in order to
make it more easily findable by Icelandic library patrons.
Practicalities and lessons learned
Follow-up was a key part of the work. In approximately
half the cases the writer needed to contact the rightsholder
again, after the forms had been sent, to provide continued
encouragement. Some of the rightsholders were elderly or
in failing health, many preferred to communicate by let-
ter rather than by scanning and e-mailing, and most were
unfamiliar with the different types of Creative Commons
licenses supported by HathiTrust (they all took the writer’s
suggestion of the CC-BY license).
Some authors said immediately that they had been want-
ing to place their book on the web for free for a long time
but did not know how. They thanked the writer for making
contact. A couple authors asked whether an errata sheet
could be added to the scan at HathiTrust, but accepted the
writer’s response that this was not currently possible, and
that better availability for the original work, even if it con-
tained errors, was a worthy goal.
A few authors asked if more of their books could be
scanned and added to the HathiTrust collection. In one
case the writer was able to arrange for five further titles
by an author to be added to the book shipments sent to
Google for scanning by a HathiTrust partner library. As
well, the writer was able to arrange for books by three other
authors, whose names were not on the original list of 621
titles, to be sent for scanning by the same library. Adding in
these works raises the total number of titles in HathiTrust
to which the project opened access from 28 to 36, and the
total number of authors from 25 to 28. However, arranging
for hitherto unscanned books to be added to HathiTrust’s
collections turned out to be time-consuming, paperwork-
intensive, slow, and full of uncertainties. (A HathiTrust
partner library had to be found that was in a position to
send the book to Google for scanning, someone at the
library had to agree to send it, a Google account had to
claim the title and manage it within Google Books, and
as no feedback was ever received from any of these parties,
the process had to be manually monitored so a permissions
form could be sent to HathiTrust after several months
when the book ultimately appeared in its database.) The
writer found it ultimately more efficient to focus on open-
ing access to already-scanned books.
In six cases contact was made not with the actual author
but with the author’s heirs. In four cases this was the au-
thor’s widow, in one case it was the author’s siblings, and
in another case it was the author’s children. Of the three
rightsholders who said definitively that they did not wish
to open access to their works, two were widows of the
author. Finding heirs was not difficult. Iceland is a small
society where author death dates are generally recorded in
the national library catalog and there is a tradition of very
detailed survivor listings in newspaper obituaries which are
indexed online. In other countries, heir searching might be
time-consuming and expensive. Stratton (2011, 33-36) and
Stobo (2013, 21-22) report that the ARROW rightsholder
information system (www.arrow-net.eu) has been useful in
similar British projects; Iceland does not participate in AR-
ROW.
It was disappointing not to be able to try opening access to
edited collections. Here the number of authors was simply
too large to risk putting time into the book, as a single au-
thor could effectively block open access to the entire title.
The writer did not keep an exact record of his time but
estimates that the average amount of working time needed
to open access to a single work was three to four hours.
Overall, the process felt slow. The writer often wished that
public consciousness about the possibility of opening access
to earlier works could have been raised before contacting
authors. For example, if the issue had been discussed in Ice-
landic radio or TV, authors might already have been aware
that they had the power to open access to their works. The
writer attempted to organize media coverage of the project
but without success.
Rightsholder issues
The issue of publication rights was a source of uncer-
tainty throughout the project and also had elements that
sometimes bordered on the comic or the absurd. At the
beginning of the project, the writer focused on contacting
authors who appeared to be the sole rightsholder to their
works. In some cases these books were self-published. In
others they had been published long ago by university de-
partments or research institutes, with copyright notices that
implied that the institution did not reserve any rights to the
work. As the project went on and the writer gained experi-
ence, he began to work on books where there was more
likelihood that a publisher might have a continued interest
in the title.