On copied books and copyright

The other day, I had a brief conversation with the boss of my boss, in which he mentioned a suggested change in the process for prepping Google Rejects from the external shelving facility for scanning. Apparently, in one meeting or another, Section 108 of copyright law came up.

Basically, Section 108 is what allows libraries to make copies of books they own, even if that item is not in public domain. The reason it relates to the preparation of Google Rejects for scanning is because it allows for the creation of preservation-quality copies of an item in poor condition and allows them to be accessed at the library, provided the library actually owns the original item.

A while back, I'd been looking at the preservation page of my undergraduate's library, and noticed a line about books beyond repair. Basically, what they do in the case where a book is beyond repair and further handling would destroy it is to make preservation-quality photocopies of the book, rebind these photocopies, and stick them out on the shelf instead. I'm not entirely sure what happens to the original items after this is done, but I suspect that they get disbound to some extent while being photocopied - books with brittle paper are AWFULLY hard to open up and keep in one piece - and the remains either get discarded or put into an external shelving facility, possibly with the value of the original item kept in mind while making this decision. Given all we hear about copyright and so on here in library school, I'd been wondering what gave them the ability to do that, and Section 108 is the answer.

Now, to hop back to the first couple of paragraphs: the reason my boss's boss spent a meeting talking about Section 108 is because an awful lot of the Google Rejects we're processing are in very poor condition when we get to them. There is generally a pretty good reason these items were rejected from Google's scanning process. Maybe the covers were detached, maybe the binding was loose, maybe they were just overall far along in the process of falling apart completely.* So, one way or another, we have to deal with them. The non-unique items get disbound and guillotined, the unique ones stay intact, and for the most part, off they go to a vendor.** Sometimes, they're in such poor condition that disbinding and guillotining them seems almost kind.

Unfortunately, this process really limits the use of the original item from that point onward, since it tends to be just a collection of loose pages if it was a non-unique item. And, if the book is from after 1923, it's not yet in public domain, which means the library cannot put a full version of a digital copy up online.

However, if the item was already in really poor condition, the library is allowed to make a digital copy for preservation and make it available to people who are able to use the library's resources: students, faculty, and staff. ***

So the proposed change to the process of prepping these books for scanning is to take a few extra minutes and note the condition of the item beforehand. Originally, they'd hoped to hunt down books that had already been scanned and determine which ones they'd be allowed to put up online, but that ended up being far too labor-intensive. But adding a check to the condition of items as we process them is much less so, and a change likely to be instated.


*The other segment of books that gets rejected the most from Google's scanning process is the segment of books full of oversized items, which range from "Dear god this book is two feet wide" to "Dear god this book has 5000 pages". These books are a whole other issue.

**These books are all in the external shelving facility, which for the most part means that they do not get used very much and are quite often in poor condition and cannot be taken out of the reading room. Disbinding and guillotining decreases the cost of scanning by quite a bit, as they can be fed through an automatic scanner. In theory, when and if the DCU starts digitizing rejected books from the main stacks, there will probably be a different process for Google Rejects that have a greater potential for frequent use. In other words, less disbinding and guillotining.

***Which, of course, brings up the issue of whether a single copy of an item made via photocopies and a single digital copy of something are equivalent, which... they really aren't. A single photocopied copy of an item can only be used by one person at a time, while a digital copy can be used by multiple people at the same time, which makes their lumping together as the same sort of "single" copy of an item rather strange, even if use is limited to those who can normally use the library resources.

A brief introduction

I've put off starting a blog about being a library science grad student for so long that I'm almost to the point where it'll have to be a blog about being a librarian instead.

But really, that sort of blogging tends to turn into whining, so instead, I'll just be putting up various interesting things on a variety of topics, most of which will be related in one way or another to library science. Or being a library science grad student. Or being a librarian. Or young adult fiction. Or whatever is on my mind at the time, really.

Currently, I work in the Digital Conversion Unit at the University of Michigan as a low-paid student minion, a job I actually really love because I get to disbind and guillotine books in preparation for digitization by some of our vendors. Disbinding and guillotining books is an incredibly soothing process.

Hello, I'm Madison. Nice to meet you.