PRIMARY SOURCES

ON COPYRIGHT

(1450-1900)


Tech Info

Update 2023

On 16/17 October 2023, a copyright history conference took place in Glasgow to celebrate 15 years of Primary Sources on Copyright and mark the following developments:

    Completion of Vatican section (Jane Ginsburg)
    Additions to Portugal/Brazil section (Patricia Akester, Victor Drummond)
    Additions to France on visual arts (Katie Scott)
    Selection of documents for new Scandinavian section (Marius Buning)

Update 2021

Vatican documents were launched on 15 December 2021 at a webinar with editor Jane C. Ginsburg. Users of Primary Sources on Copyright History will also be interested in the Stationers’ Register Online project, digitising the earliest entries (1557-1640) of the copyright registers held by Stationers' Hall.

Update 2018

Jewish Law sources, edited by Neil Netanel, were published in 2016. In 2018, a second editor joined the UK section: Dr Elena Cooper, CREATe, University of Glasgow. Elena Cooper contributed further documents to Ronan Deazley's original UK selection, which illustrate distinct aspects of the history of copyright concerning the visual arts in the late nineteenth century (in the main, 1869-1900). Portuguese sources are under development (edited by Patrícia Akester and Victor Drummond).

Relaunch 2015

On 27 March 2015, we opened the Dutch section of the archive, and introduced a new look of the homepage and navigation, as part of the symposium Copyright History and Policy at the CREATe centre, University of Glasgow.

Relaunch 2012

The Spanish section of the archive, and the new database design were re-launched on 25 June 2012, as part of the annual conference of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).


Database technology

The first database (2008) was based on the open source Kleio system developed by Prof. Manfred Thaller (HKI Institute, University of Cologne, Germany).

In 2011 we redesigned the database in order to provide more flexibility and interconnectivity in regards to the provided data by switching to a LAMP oriented solution. The database now is based on CouchDB (instead of MySql which the term LAMP would indicate). The search is based on Solr which is indexing all provided transcription and translation text files. All browsing resp. linking mechanisms are PHP based database requests of specified CouchDB Views.


the following is dated information and is pending review


Links within record and commentary information

Every record or commentary information is linked to a database request about that term and its related data. This enables in a convenient way to dig deeper in a specific field of interest (i.e. keywords) when presented on a selected record or commentary.
This is one extension to the first database version where only commentaries and related records were linked.



Wikipedia and Google Books search results

In order to improve the service we integrated search results found on Wikipedia as well as Google Books. Since this is done automatically results may not always be accurate.



Dublin Core via OAI/PMH

We provide an  data interface, delivering our record data in Dublin Core. The interface follows the specifications:

ListIdentifiers and ListRecords have a resumptionToken implementation, reducing the response to 50 results per request (starting with a cursor=0 when called without that parameter)

Example:
https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/oai_pmh/oai.php?verb=ListIdentifiers&resumptionToken=5