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srobinson on DSK4SPTVN1PROD with NOTICES
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Federal Register / Vol. 78, No. 56 / Friday, March 22, 2013 / Notices
including through professional
associations and small businesses to
participate in a series of focused
discussions on issues relating to the
Office’s platforms for registration,
document recordation, and public
access to copyright ownership
information. Through these discussions,
as well as through its own expert
analysis, the Office has identified a
number of areas in which the current
electronic system could be improved.
For example, numerous interested
parties have observed that the current
user interface for electronic registration
is a challenge to navigate. Users have
told the Office that it would be helpful
to be able to customize the user
interface and workflow in order to
streamline the registration process to
accommodate their own internal
workflows. Moreover, users would like
to exercise some degree of control over
the nature and scope of information
they view in a personalized registration
system dashboard. The Copyright Office
is aware of similar requests from its own
staff, many of whom desire
customizable workflows to enhance
productivity and process efficiency,
which would result in improved
turnaround times for remitters.
At a global level, the Office is aware
that as mobile technology becomes
ubiquitous, an increasing number of
stakeholders desire to use mobile
devices to interact with the Office. To
that end, the Office is evaluating the
potential to deploy a mobile optimized
web interface, ‘‘apps’’ that support
popular mobile platforms, and the
development of an application program
interface (API) that can be utilized
within third party applications.
The Office has also heard that many
of its users would benefit from
improved tracking capabilities.
Remitters have indicated that the
existing electronic registration process
is cumbersome and are oftentimes
uncertain of their progress within the
application process; to improve that
aspect of the system, they have
suggested that the Office implement a
visual representation of the registration
workflow and the user’s status within it
(e.g., a status bar).
Beyond improvements to the
registration functions, the Office is
aware of opportunities for improvement
to its public record search capabilities.
Stakeholders have indicated that the
Office’s search function should be more
robust, allowing for more search criteria,
refining the display of the search
results, adding filters, and generally
making the search functionality more
user-friendly. Representatives from
interested parties also suggested the
Copyright Office make it easier to
provide updates to the public record to
ensure the data maintained is accurate
and up to date (e.g., address changes).
The Office is thus investigating methods
of secure and effective data sharing
between interested parties and the
Copyright Office in order to determine
if such functionality can be
implemented in a manner that ensures
integrity of the Office’s records.
The Office is also aware of the need
for long-term, scalable data storage and
archiving capability to accommodate the
growing volume of digital works that the
Office receives. The Office has received
recommendations to centralize the
various information clusters internally
within the Copyright Office to a central
data repository and establish a central
data warehouse. Implementing such a
warehouse presents a series of
challenges that the Office seeks to learn
more about, including determining
scalable infrastructure solutions to
accommodate vast amounts of data,
analyzing data standards needed to
establish a central data model, and
evaluating potential data archival
strategies.
One recommendation that the Office
frequently hears, and one that underlies
many of the areas of improvement noted
above, is the need for bulk data transfer
between the Office and interested
outside parties. Such transfer
mechanisms would allow more
widespread distribution of the Office’s
records, as well as permit remitters to
submit large quantities of electronic
material and associated application data
to the Office. Such ‘‘system-to-system’’
or ‘‘business-to-business’’ capabilities
are a central area of inquiry for the
Office. Interested parties have suggested
that the Office expose data portals
enabled to facilitate data exchange over
standards-based protocols such as
ebMS, SOAP, and AS4.
In support of potential bulk data
transfer capabilities, the Office is
investigating specific data exchange
standards, including those that already
exist as well as the potential for
developing a new standard based upon
the needs of the Office’s constituents.
Interested parties have told the Office
that it should continue to take an active
role and adopt existing standards that
support data exchange between the
Office and its stakeholders. This
includes defining or adopting metadata
standards that support particular
industries (e.g., IPTC for photography;
ISRC for sound recordings; ONIX for
books). Further, standards such as
CISAC’s Common Works Registration
(CWR) and DDEX digital supply chain
standards should be considered to help
develop the Office’s ability to provide
better business-to-business data
transfers. Interested parties have
suggested that the Copyright Office
publish a recognized list of data
standards so that users are able to
establish systems that support more
efficient interactions with the Copyright
Office.
III. Subjects of Inquiry
The Copyright Office is currently
evaluating what the ‘‘next generation’’
of its electronic services should look
like. Through a comprehensive
evaluation of its current technical
processing capabilities, and extensive
interaction with stakeholders, the Office
hopes to develop a complete picture of
how the Office currently supports the
needs of the copyright community, and
where its systems and services could be
improved. The Office hopes to achieve
a greater understanding of current
technical challenges facing the
copyright community as well as gain a
comprehensive understanding of how
the community hopes to conduct
business with the Copyright Office in
the future. This evaluation process,
which is tied to special projects detailed
in Priorities and Special Projects of the
U.S. Copyright Office released by the
Register of Copyrights in October 2011,
is intended to inform the development
of the Office’s next five-year strategic
plan that will commence in October
2013 and guide, among other things, the
technological evolution of the Copyright
Office. That plan will, in turn, inform
the Library of Congress’s overarching
strategic plan.
Because the Office’s evaluation of its
technology platform is intended to be a
wide-ranging review of existing
capabilities and future possibilities, the
Office seeks comments that present
conceptual frameworks with concrete
examples of future potential
applications or services. Broadly, the
Office seeks comments on (1) how
stakeholders use the current online
offerings of the Copyright Office,
especially with respect to registration
and recorded documents, and how the
current offerings meet, fail to meet, or
exceed user expectations; and (2) how
stakeholders would like to interact with
the Copyright Office electronically in
the future, or, put differently, what
online services, or aspects of existing
online services stakeholders would like
to see.
Although the Office welcomes
comments on the wide range of topics
germane to this inquiry, it is particularly
interested in comments that address: (1)
The nature and capabilities of the
Copyright Office’s public portals (e.g.,