Fandom History: Other Large Scale Scanning Projects (Fanac)

 A special thank you to Fanac - a science fiction and fantasy fandom group that has been working to preserve their corner of fandom history.

Fanac focuses on literary (book) fandom, with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy fanzines from the 1930s-1960s. They maintain a website that hosts many fanzines in PDF format. This year they started offering scanning stations at science fiction conventions where people can bring their zines to be scanned. They will have a scanning station at Dublin Worldcon this weekend. They also have a wonderful YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/FANACFanHistory

From their latest newsletter

"At Boskone 56 (February) and again at Corflu 36 (May), we arranged with the conventions to set up our FANAC Scanning Station. We bring at least one scanner and computer and ask that fans bring fanzines to the convention that we can scan and archive online. This has been pretty successful, resulting in our scanning over 2,000 pages at Boskone and over 3,500 pages at Corflu. We had many notable contributions of fanzines for scanning, including from Grant Canfield, Frederic Gooding III, Susan Graham and her scanning team at UMBC, Rob Hansen, Dan Steffan, Geri Sullivan (2019 TAFF delegate), Pat Virzi and especially Rob Jackson who allowed us to scan a large stack of zines that were later auctioned for fan charities. Since Corflu, we’ve put over 600 fanzines online. We’ve arranged with the Dublin 2019 Worldcon to have a scanning station there as well. If you’re coming, bring something for us to scan.

FANAC Fan History Project website: http://fanac.org

As of today, we have 8,069 fanzines online, with over 92,500 pages. Of those, 2,902 are newszines (and thanks to David Ritter for the first volume of Taurasi’s Fantasy News!). Recently, we’ve tried to increase the number of fanzine titles for which we have complete runs. These are as varied as Joe Kennedy’s Vampire (1940s) to Karen Anderson’s Vorpal Glass (1960s) to Benford/White/et al’s Void (1950s-1960s). Other recently complete runs include Aporrheta (Sanderson), Bane (Ryan), Bastion (Bentcliffe), BEM (Ashworth), Blat! (White/Steffan), Epsilon (Hansen), Oopsla! (Calkins), Pendulum (Venable), Pong (White/Steffan), Spaceways (Warner), Starspinkle (Ellik), Telos (Nielsen Hayden), and Tolkien Journal (Plotz/Meskys). 
 

As a sidelight, one of our favorite fans, Lee Hoffman, also published two of the earliest (if not the earliest) folk music fanzines, and we’ve put those online as well: Caravan (1957-59) and Gardyloo (1959-60). We’ve also been adding a lot of UK fanzines. These have ranged from the 1930s to the present. They include Maurice Hanson’s Novae Terrae (thanks to Rob Hansen for the scans), C.S. Youd’s (aka John

Christopher) Fantast, plus the above listed zines BEM, Aporrheta, Bastion, and Epsilon. Others include:

 

Weston’s Speculation, Clarke’s Eye, Joan Carr et al’s Femizine, Enever & Parker’s Orion, Berry’s Pot Pourri, and more. One more interesting item from the UK: thanks to Ian Sorensen, we have the transcript of the highly entertaining GoH speech that James White gave at the 1983 Eastercon in Glasgow, titled “The Scottish Influence on Sector General”. With our scanning station at Dublin 2019, we hope to add many Irish and other European fanzines.
 

You might also be interested in newly uploaded issues of Terry Carr’s Innuendo and Lighthouse, Riddle’s Peon, Geis’ Psychotic/Science Fiction Review, Alien Critic... and Harlan Ellison’s fanzines."

Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are n

"PRE-’64 IN PUBLIC DOMAIN.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says “Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain”.

…But there’s another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed….

…Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what’s more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status).

______________________________________________

To which I will add: up until March 1, 1989, items published without the requisite copyright notices are also in the public domain.*

What was required?

*the word “copyright”
*a “c” in a circle (©)
*the date of publication, and
*the name of either the author or the owner of all the copyright rights in the published work.

(c) or "All Rights Reserved (on its own)" do not meet the statutory requirements. "Copyr." does

*There was a grace period allowing publishers to fix any errors
**All the above applies to US law