Copyright renewal records for US books online

[kacir]

I found the following information on BoingBoing today:

A Google engineer has tracked down, munged and XMLified the copyright renewal notices for all the books the US Copyright Office knows about -- now there's a one-click way to discover if an old book is in the public domain (more or less) and who holds the copyright if it isn't.

So now you can find out if the US copyright of a book has been renewed by just one click.

Database download page: Link

[Nate the great]

Question: What do I use to view a 56MB XML file?

[Nergal]

Nate the Great, I just downloaded it, unpacked it has a size of 371.6 MB

In case you have some Unix derivate at hand:

less google-renewals-all-20080624.xml

and I had within a second the first record. Though with all the tags around.

cat google-renewals-all-20080624.xml | grep 'Tolkien'

and I found pretty quick there are indeed some books with copyright still, now I think some simple xml-viewer for this file is needed.

a third check in similar way: cat google-renewals-all-20080624.xml | grep 'Puchstein'
gave not a single entry, so for sure this is not a complete catalogue (I wonder how big that file would have to be ...)

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Question: What do I use to view a 56MB XML file?

Personally, I would import it into a Visual FoxPro database and then be able to do quick queries against it. If I were so inclined to need to do so.

BOb

[Jeff Duntemann]

Stanford did this some time ago, and there's a very nice Web interface:

http://collections.stanford.edu/copy...1A53459D8CD4A9

Most people don't have much call to view 300+ MB databases, so this approach is probably a lot better. I don't know if this is precisely the same database as Google extracted from government records, but it's still very useful.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by Jeff Duntemann

Stanford did this some time ago, and there's a very nice Web interface:

http://collections.stanford.edu/copy...1A53459D8CD4A9

Most people don't have much call to view 300+ MB databases, so this approach is probably a lot better. I don't know if this is precisely the same database as Google extracted from government records, but it's still very useful.

Thanks Jeff.

[Steve Jordan]

Now, if only the copyright office would allow me to send my latest book in as a digital file, instead of printed pages...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Nergal

Nate the Great, I just downloaded it, unpacked it has a size of 371.6 MB

In case you have some Unix derivate at hand:

less google-renewals-all-20080624.xml

and I had within a second the first record. Though with all the tags around.

A Windows console version of less is available from the Less home page: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/index.html

cat google-renewals-all-20080624.xml | grep 'Tolkien'

"grep Tolkien google-renewals-all-20080624.xml" also works. No need for the cat and pipeline.

A Windows console version of grep is available as part of a set of Gnu utilities for Windows, here: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

and I found pretty quick there are indeed some books with copyright still, now I think some simple xml-viewer for this file is needed.

The challenge will be the file size. I tried a couple of XML viewers/editors, and they choked on it with out of memory errors. (I have a 3,1ghz Pentium box running XP Pro with 1GB of RAM.)
______
Dennis

[igorsk]

EmEditor can work with large files. But I prefer the viewer built in in my FAR Manager - as it doesn't try to load up the whole file for editing, viewing and searching is extremely quick for any file size.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by igorsk

EmEditor can work with large files. But I prefer the viewer built in in my FAR Manager - as it doesn't try to load up the whole file for editing, viewing and searching is extremely quick for any file size.

I think I have FAR Manager around here. I'll have to play with it a bit.

Open Office Base 2.4 and 3.0 choked trying to import it.

I was able to actually open it with a neat freeware product called Henry's Textplorer, but it took a fair bit of time to do it, and searches in the file were likewise slow. (Textplorer is here: http://www.henrykellner.com/Textplorer/index.html)

I suppose I could manage to import it to a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, but it isn't worth the trouble. Less and grep will do for the limited uses I have.
______
Dennis

[pagansoul]

Hummmm..at home I have an 8GB Ram/4TB HD MacPro. I'll give it a try after work.