Crown Copyright Project Concludes with 69K Reviews

In early 2020, the Copyright Review Program began a new project to review government documents for crown copyright, including UK, Australia, and Canadian government works. This work was accomplished through the contributed time of 15 individuals from 10 member libraries in Canada and the U.S. The team recently celebrated the project completion after many rounds of reviews and with final copyright determinations made on 69,070 items. They were able to open more than 53,000 government documents for public domain access in Canada, Australia, and the UK.

The collection of commonwealth documents represent publications spanning the 1930s to 1970s. Of those, 30,020 were published in Canada; 32,085 were published in the UK; and 6,865 were published in Australia. Titles include Ale and Lager Beer and Kewagama Lake map-area, Quebec.

The Copyright Review Program has operated since 2008 and in June 2022, surpassed 1 million total items reviewed. The program has relied on more than 83,000 hours of in-kind staff time from HathiTrust member libraries and have determined more than 570,000 items in HathiTrust to be in the public domain. Thank you to all our members contributing staff time to this Program!