Improvements to Tech, Records Accessibility Top Copyright Office's 2016-2020 Draft Strategic Plan Goals

strategic plan. The strategic plan is to take effect Dec. 1. The CO said it “must be a model for twenty-first century government” that's “future-focused.” The CO and the Library of Congress have faced significant criticism this year on technology issues, including a GAO report that criticized LOC for not modernizing critical systems (see 1503310046) and for a lengthy late summer outage of critical CO systems (see 1509080058). "Broad-ranging modernization efforts are needed to meet the changing needs of individual authors, entrepreneurs, the user community, and the general public," said Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a statement. CO systems “should inspire confidence and encourage participation in day-to-day services and transactions,” the office said in its draft strategic plan. “Custom search tools should yield quick, authoritative results. In short, technology should support all aspects of the Copyright Office’s mission and adapt to evolving needs.” The CO said it’s developing a “detailed IT plan” and will seek public comment on “specific strategies, costs, and timelines for technology objectives.” The CO is planning to expand engagement with a range of copyright stakeholders on technology issues and will “adopt industry technology standards, architectures, and cloud services” that will be compatible with current and future tech. The CO said it’s analyzing requirements for “premium on-premises and off-premises hosting solutions” for copyright systems. The CO will also strengthen its procedures for making technology investments to ensure there’s a comprehensive review of all proposed investments. The CO said it also set a strategic goal to make copyright records “easily searchable and widely available” to stakeholders. Copyright records “can fuel any number of innovative business models if captured and organized properly and provided in a timely manner,” CO said. The office plans to use business strategies to integrate its “registration and recordation systems” and will use a “robust” public records search engine that will allow for faceted searching and unlimited results. CO said it plans to work with private sector stakeholders to “formalize accepted metadata standards and increase use of unique identifiers” in copyright records. The CO also plans to advance its use of third-party programs and other technologies and ensure they’re interoperable with CO data and records. The CO said it plans to expand the number of records integrated into its online contemporary records database. Other CO strategic goals include effective administration of U.S. copyright laws, providing impartial assistance to all branches of the federal government on copyright law, recruiting a diverse expert pool and delivering “outstanding” resources to stakeholders.