LAUSR

On May 16, 2011, the University of Michigan (U-M) announced that the U-M Library’s Copyright Office was “launching the first serious effort to identify orphan works among the in-copyright holdings of the HathiTrust Digital Library.”1 HathiTrust, a partnership of libraries and major research institutions, has long worked to hold, preserve, and make available digital content to contribute to the common good. In conversation with this mission, the Orphan Works Project built on the earlier research of then executive director of HathiTrust John Wilkin. In his paper, “Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of ‘Rights’ in Digital Collection Building,”2 Wilkin first identified the potential of the orphan works issue using, in part, data generated by the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) grant project managed by the U-M Library and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.