Accessing 70 Million copyright records at LC may help you find more records for your family history.
These newly available Library of Congress (LC) copyright records may document an ancestor or relative who published a family history, novel, or other creative work. If your writer-ancestor claimed copyright by submitting a copy of their work to the Library of Congress, then this is the database for you.
The image above is a sample from a new digitization project at the U.S. Copyright Office. Staff member Mike Burke wrote a blog entry about this new database, which I think is of some evidential value to genealogists. He writes:
The U.S. Copyright Office has a comprehensive set of records about books, periodicals, music, motion pictures and other works that were registered with the Office between 1870 and 1977. The records include transfers and assignments of rights reported to the Office. Until now these records have existed only in paper and microfilm form, but the Office has an exciting project underway to convert these non-digital records and make them available via the web. Over 13 million catalog cards have already been digitized as well as more than half of the Catalogs of Copyright Entries published since 1891. This latter set is available for searching through the Internet Archive.
The Copyright Office is working on digitizing these records and has launched Copyright Matters: Digitization and Public Access, a blog to publicize the project’s goals, objectives and progress. Please visit the blog and feel free to submit your thoughts and ideas about getting the most out of these records for genealogical research.
Do these copyright records help your family history research? Let me know.
And for more research tips from this blog, click here.
And for more information on copyright in the United States, click here.
