Libraries at Cornell, Duke, Emory and Johns Hopkins universities jointly announced Aug. 24 that they would begin making the full text of thousands of "orphan works" in their library collections digitally accessible at their own institutions.

Orphan works are out-of-print books that are still subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or located.

With the announcement, the four institutions formally join the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Florida in the collaborative Orphan Works Project, which aims to identify orphan works that have been scanned and archived in the HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 50 major research institutions working to share, archive and preserve collections of digitized books and journals.

Currently, more than 9 million digitized volumes are held by the HathiTrust. It is unknown exactly how many of those are orphans, but HathiTrust Executive Director John Wilkin has estimated that it could be as many as half. Of those, most are unlikely to have any surviving person or entity who can claim them.

"We strongly believe in supporting the fair use of orphan works material," said Anne Kenney, Cornell's Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "It continues our tradition of pushing hard to open up scholarly resources and helping to provide the broadest access possible to them."

Only books identified as orphans and held in print format by the individual institutions will be accessible through the HathiTrust website, and they will only be accessible to members of their respective communities. Just as most academic libraries only allow authorized patrons to check out books from their print collections, online access will be restricted to users who can authenticate themselves with an ID or password. However, if a university library is open to the public, visitors will have access through library computers.

Even with these access restrictions, the Orphan Works Project will greatly improve access to a large amount of scholarly material that has been digitally unavailable due to copyright concerns. According to Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke, "I think we can expect access to tens of thousands of orphan works within the first year. The speed with which that number could rise will depend on the ability of the community to do the work of identifying orphans."

"Many of these works have tremendous historical and cultural value, and they are an important part of the record of 20th century scholarship," said Rick Luce, vice provost and director of libraries at Emory University.

Orphan works have been a major factor in recent legal disputes over the Google Books project. In March 2011, a federal judge rejected the company's $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, stating that the deal went too far in granting Google the right to make such works accessible online without permission from copyright owners.

Because the Orphan Works Project limits access to members of individual institutions, it adheres to the Copyright Act's "fair use" provision, which allows limited reproduction of works for scholarly purposes.