Digital Commons Network^™

The Next Mother Lode For Large-Scale Digitization? Historic Serials, Copyrights, And Shared Knowledge, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Much of the publicity around recent mass-digitization projects focuses on the millions of books they promise to make freely readable online. Because of copyright, though, most of the books provided in full will be of mainly historical interest. But much of the richest historical text content is not in books at all, but in the newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and scholarly journals where events are reported firsthand, stories and essays make their debut, research findings are announced and critiqued, and issues of the day debated. Back runs of many of these serials are available in major research institutions but often in …