Today the University of Michigan Library decided to postpone its HathiTrust project until they can correct “a number of errors” in the list of books they deemed orphan works.
Here’s more from the release: “The close and welcome scrutiny of the list of potential orphan works has revealed a number of errors, some of them serious. This tells us that our pilot process is flawed. Having learned from our mistakes—we are, after all, an educational institution—we have already begun an examination of our procedures to identify the gaps that allowed volumes that are evidently not orphan works to be added to the list. Once we create a more robust, transparent, and fully documented process, we will proceed with the work…”
Earlier this week, the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ) and eight authors sued HathiTrust to prevent libraries from sharing free copies of some books in a digital collection seven million books. (Via Publishers Weekly)