However, Wilkin said for the most part living copyright holders are enthusiastic about being included in the database and that the University often has authors contacting them from around the world to be included in the project.

“Typically when we contact a rights holder about a work, the rights holder says ‘Oh please open access of that work to everybody in the world,’” he said.

He added that the orphan works project at the University is one of the first of its kind, and while similar efforts have been made at other institutions, it is the forefront of a new program that will likely attract notice from others around the nation.

“It would be wrong to say orphan works digitization hasn’t happened, but it hasn’t happened for the published record in this way, and not on any sort of scale,” he said. “We are singular in this regard. We will be doing something that the world will be watching and I mean that quite seriously. Other research libraries are going to be paying close attention to this and it will begin to shift their activity as they come along.”