Copyright Office modernizes its search system

The Copyright Office this week replaced its old Telnet search system with Web-based searching for copyright information about books, music recordings, movies, software and other works.The Web search page, at , offers a choice of three search areas: general works such as books and films, serials such as magazines and newspapers, or documents such as contracts and wills.Searchers can narrow the description by fields such as author, claimant, title, number or miscellaneous criteria. The copyright database dates back to 1978. Its general works category has more than 13 million items and is updated weekly.The Telnet system, called LOCIS for Library of Congress Information System [see story at ], works via lowercase keyboard entries and does not use a graphical interface or a mouse. Its files on federal legislation were frozen in December 1998, having been superseded by Web publishing, but its copyright files are kept up to date.