question on copyright status of ETD's 1978-1989

[Marian Taliaferro]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping you all can provide some guidance on the copyright status of ETD's written from 1978 through Feb, 1989. We embarked upon a retrospective conversion (scanning) project for our ETD’s before I arrived last fall, and we are sifting through the notifications process in advance of potentially adding these records to our institutional repository (IR) which is the de facto university archive for these documents. While we are are clear with the status of copyright up through 1977, for 1978-1989, it is less clear per the guide at Cornell and the digital slider from the ALA which seems to indicate that the copyright is held if the authors filed for it, though we had heard that was the case only up through 1977 . Do you know if ETD’s written between 1978-1989 are copyrighted? We checked them to ascertain if the authors had claimed the copyright for each. Does the status hinge on whether they were considered “published”? Does copyright law consider all ETD's for these dates published and copyrighted across the board or does it depend on whether the author claimed and/or filed for copyright, or are there other considerations we should keep in mind with these ETD’s? Thanks in advance for any help which you may be able to provide. ETD's do seem to be their own beast!

Best,

Marian Taliaferro

Digital Scholarship Librarian

William & Mary