Frequently Asked Questions

This Proof of Concept (PoC) is a demonstration of the feasibility of providing online access to the Copyright Card Catalog. The images are presented in a similar filing order as found in the physical card catalog and may contain filing errors and corrupt images. In addition, the enhanced browse functionality queries raw OCR data, which may contain errors.

This PoC does not replace or supersede existing search practices established by the United States Copyright Office, and the results should not be relied on for legal matters. For information on searching Copyright Records, refer to How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work (Circular 22). For information regarding the removal of personal information from the Virtual Card Catalog, please refer to Privacy: Copyright Public Records (Circular 18).

The Copyright Card Catalog is the most complete and accurate collection of copyright records of ownership in the world. The cards are indexes to the actual copyright registrations and records in the U.S. Copyright Office from 1870 to 1977, containing digitized images of card drawers and card images taken from the physical card catalog. The Proof of Concept Virtual Card Catalog contains the records from 1870 to 1977.

The VCC contains limited information from the U.S. Copyright Card Catalog. At this point, the VCC does not provide a complete set of card records to allow you to conduct a copyright ownership search. Please see How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work (Circular 22). on how to investigate the copyright status of a work.

An index is an alphabetical list of names and titles that point to a record during a specific time period. The indexes or segments within the Card Catalog contain a chronological range of years. Within the Card Catalog, there are six primary registration segments, some with multiple indexes that are organized by index or time period, drawers and cards.

A virtual card catalog drawer in the VCC contains images of the physical cards located in the Copyright Reading Room. A virtual drawer contains images of cards that correspond to the alphabetical range as shown on the front of the drawer. The cards within the drawer are divided into alphabetical groups with personal names followed by corporate names and titles.

A virtual catalog card image is an exact replica of the physical card from the Card Catalog. The card image contains bibliographic information about a copyrighted work such as the name of the author and copyright claimant, title, registration number, and date of publication or registration.

No, VCC contains roughly 99.9 percent of the images for the 1870–1977 time period. There are a few missing drawers, and images will continue to be added to the VCC.

The VCC incorporates two sets of metadata. The first set is associated with the name of the drawer and the Card ID number. The Drawer Name is the exact name as it appears on the physical drawer. In addition, data capture has been performed on the card images, yielding raw datasets. These datasets represent the content on the card image. While the metadata for the drawers and images is nearly 100 percent accurate, the raw data sets are roughly 90 percent accurate for the typed content of the last two indexes (1955-1970 and 1971-1977), and much less accurate for the earlier indexes. For this reason, only the 1955-1977 cards are filterable by the card content.

Where the content is typed and handwritten, data capture is not available at this time. The USCO is working on completing the data capture for select metadata. Searchable metadata and card images can be found in the Copyright Public Records System Pilot.

The Card ID is the sequence of the card within the drawer, including any misfiled cards. Thus, all Card IDs for any drawer start with 0001. Where there are multiple pages to a card set, the additional images include a character on the end of the ID. For example, a card set that contains two pages (front and back) would be labeled 0001a and 0001b.

On the CARD CATALOG page, there are two independent sets of numbers associated with the card images. Card IDs are assigned to each card within a drawer starting from the front of the drawer with 0001 and continuing through the last card in the drawer. Multi-page card sets have alpha characters on the end (e.g. 0001a, 0001b, 0001c) to identify the set.

In addition, each card image has a count assigned to it based upon its location within the results. Thus, while the Card ID starts with 0001 in every drawer, filtered results that cover multiple drawers will not restart with each new drawer.

Titles and names do not qualify for copyright protection. For more information on what is not protected by copyright, see Works Not Protected by Copyright (Circular 33).

Punctuation such as exclamations(!), question marks(?), periods(.), and apostrophes(‘) are ignored by the SOLR search engine that performs the queries on the card content. These characters should be omitted from the filter criteria.

The history of actions during filtering, browsing, viewing, and other actions are captured within the notifications window. This window is available by clicking on the bell icon on the menu bar. As you progress through the VCC, with each notification, the number aligned with the bell icon adjusts. The notifications may be copied from the window and placed into another file or document (e.g., email, text documents, etc.)

Yes, due to limited screen space on mobile devices, several minor features have been omitted that include:

1. The page size for drawers and cards is limited to 50 and cannot be changed.
2. The search crumbs are omitted on the smaller devices. However, the notifications feature captures the complete history of the search and may be used instead.
3. Informational text available on the tabs has been omitted. However, this text can also be found on the Help and FAQ pages.