Dear Congress: Please Don’t Make It More Difficult And Dangerous To Be A Library

copyrightoffice1Last Friday, the Internet Archive and several of our library, archive, and museum partners sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) urging him not to make it more difficult and dangerous to be a library.

As we wrote about over the summer, the U.S. Copyright Office is proposing to completely rewrite Section 108, the part of the law that is designed to support traditional library functions such as preservation and inter-library loans. Although the proposal has not been made public yet, we understand from our meeting with them that the Copyright Office wants to redefine who gets to be a library, making it harder for small players and virtual libraries to be protected under the law. The proposal is also likely to be damaging to fair use and may add new, burdensome regulations on libraries who archive the web (among other things).

Thankfully, the Copyright Office does not write the law–that is up to Congress. Our letter explains that now is not the time to scrap the old law, which is working well. The Copyright Office’s proposal is not only unnecessary, but potentially harmful to library efforts to increase access to information. We hope Congress will take the strong objections of the library community seriously when considering the Copyright Office’s proposal to rewrite the law that applies to libraries.

3 thoughts on “Dear Congress: Please Don’t Make It More Difficult And Dangerous To Be A Library

  1. joeseph

    Why have you abandoned conventional hierarchical indexing for your newspaper collection? it’s super-frustrating to scroll through thousands of Antioch News’s wondering if anything at all is going to exist below them. Is there some view where I can see exactly *one* entry for Antioch News and exactly *one* entry for American Bible, etc.? That is, a simple, expandable listing of each publication in the archive? Rather than treating each single-day issue of a newspaper as an entirely different publication? The current situation makes browsing impossible. Thanks!

    1. jeff kaplan

      Each day is an individual item page because each one has unique metadata. I’d suggest you refine your search query and use the “Sort by” bar to filter it in the best way for your needs. Also, you can use advanced search to get a list of all items returned by a query and specify the fields you want returned. Hope this helps.

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