Copyright and History, and the Library of Congress

Today I'd like to start by looking at the world of copyright through the lens of digital historians.  Copyright, so the government would like to tell us, protects our ideas form being copied by others.  For historians this poses a problem.  As we are not able to post anything containing copyright except from Public Domain, Creative commons or General Public License resources.  This problem, for historians, was essentially created in 1976 when copyright transformed form 28 years total to essentially 70 years after ones death.  The whole transformation of copyright is covered very well in Cohen and Rosenzweig's Digital History Chapter Owning the Past?  Cohen and Rosenzweig create a table which is an essential resource for digital historians explaining which items are inside and outside of copyright. Essentially any text created after 1923, with some exceptions are under copyright.  This gets worse when looking at different mediums, which the digital historian would like to use.  For instance there is essentially no public domain for music or film.  This conundrum puts many contemporary digital historians in a conundrum.

Wrestling, 1950-1970, Department of Corrections, McNeil Island Corrections Center Photograph Collection, 1855-2010, Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.wa.gov, 10/27/2012. 

Certain online repositories allow use of their images, the Washington State Digital Archives being one of them.

In the above image I would like to name the wrestler on top Copyright and the poor chap underneath Digital Historian.  As you can see things haven't gone the way the Digital Historian was hoping, copyright is winning.  However as Cohen and Rosenzweig explain Copyright is capable of moving and changing, with any luck Digital Historian will find his way out from underneath Copyright, even though his chances do not look very bright at the moment.

The Library of Congress websites are not nearly as exciting as I believe they could be.  However the addition of myLOC is a great step in the right direction.  MyLOC allows researchers, students, teachers and the general public to save what they are looking for for further review.  The Library of Congress hosts videos as well as photos and text.  Unfortunately their videos seem to be of lectures regarding specific actions or collections and as you might imagine tend to be dry as salt, kudos to anyone who doesn't turn this off within 25 seconds.  However the LOC is working in the right direction, for instance their collection highlights are well thought out and offer great access to holdings in their collection that would require visiting the LOC, which in many cases in impossible or impracticable.  I particularly enjoyed the Maps collection with 11638 maps available for research.