Global library coop­er­a­tive Online Com­puter Library Cen­ter, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that it is pilot­ing a new ser­vice for libraries that encour­age librar­i­ans and other inter­ested par­ties to dis­cover and share infor­ma­tion on copy­right sta­tus of books.

The World­Cat Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry is a com­mu­nity work­ing together to build a union cat­a­logue of copy­right evi­dence based on World­Cat, which con­tains over 100 mil­lion bib­li­o­graphic records describ­ing items held in thou­sands of libraries world­wide. In addi­tion to the World­Cat meta­data, the Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry uses other data con­tributed by libraries and other organ­i­sa­tions. The new ser­vice seeks to encour­age a coop­er­a­tive envi­ron­ment to dis­cover, cre­ate and share copy­right evi­dence through a col­lab­o­ra­tively cre­ated and main­tained data­base, using the World­Cat coop­er­a­tive model to elim­i­nate dupli­cate efforts.

The Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry six-month pilot was launched July 1 to test the con­cept and func­tion­al­ity. Users can search the Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry to find infor­ma­tion about a book, learn what oth­ers have said about its copy­right sta­tus, and share what they know. Dur­ing a later stage of the pilot, OCLC will add a fea­ture enabling pilot libraries to cre­ate and run auto­mated copy­right rules con­form­ing to stan­dards they define for deter­min­ing copy­right sta­tus. The rules will help libraries analyse the infor­ma­tion avail­able in the Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry and form their own con­clu­sions about copy­right status.

The World­Cat Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry beta can be accessed at http://www.worldcat.org/copyrightevidence. OCLC has called for feed­backs on the Copy­right Evi­dence Reg­istry from the library com­mu­nity on the WorldCat.org web­site at http://www.worldcat.org/copyrightevidence/registry/feedback.