The University of Pennsylvania's Catalog of Copyright Entries information page now includes online records of copyright renewals for drama (and works intended for oral delivery) up to 1968, thanks to John Mark Ockerbloom, a University of Pennsylvania digital library architect and planner, Mimi Calter, the Stanford Libraries' special projects librarian and intellectual property manager, and James Jacobs, the Stanford Libraries' government information librarian and a specialist in digital technologies and information access in the digital world.
Penn's Catalog of Copyright Entries information page has included copyright renewals for normal books, and periodicals, but had been missing renewal records for drama. John Mark Ockerbloom could use the scanning services of Penn's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), but was unable to find copyright renewal records for drama anywhere in the Philadelphia area. He asked Mimi Calter if the Stanford Libraries would loan their complete set. Once the Libraries agreed, James Jacobs managed the logistics of Inter-Library Loan for what are usually non-circulating items.
Although the resulting copyright renewals records for drama are page images only, it's a step towards getting them in searchable form. Ockerbloom has posted similar page images in the past that others have used to make transcriptions and structured data records. Once the records are scanned, the Stanford Libraries can look at creating fielded records, as they have done for the books they have in their Copyright Renewals Database. In addition, because Google is beginning to post original copyright restrictions, it's also possible to correlate renewals with original registrations, and look for interesting statistical phenomena and trends. For more information, see John Mark Ockerbloom's recent blog post: For those wanting more drama in their lives.
