Tulane Law School's Copyright Lab Leverages the dtSearch® Engine with Contegra Development Work for Durationator® Worldwide Copyright System

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Oct 17, 2019, 09:00 ET

NEW ORLEANS and WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. and BETHESDA, Md., Oct. 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Tulane Law School's Copyright Research Lab is spearheading a multi-year project chronicling worldwide copyright law and records. dtSearch specializes in enterprise and developer text retrieval to instantly search terabytes across a wide variety of data types. Contegra Systems is a leading third-party expert in dtSearch Engine custom development work. The Lab employed Contegra to develop a search portal using the dtSearch Engine to tackle reviewing older U.S. Copyright Office records, an often necessary step to determining the copyright status of many works in the United States.

One of the challenges to completing the Durationator System involved older U.S. Copyright registration and renewal records (called the Catalog of Copyright Entries), which have not been available for convenient public searching. Another stumbling block was the quality of OCR'ed copyright records. The final challenge was the need for a portal that would work concurrently for internal Lab research while enabling larger enterprises to do their own bulk searching.

"dtSearch provided the tool to take on the challenge of searching the records," says Elizabeth Townsend Gard, creator of the Durationator project in 2007 and now Director of Research and Development at the Durationator's home company, Limited Times, LLC, as well as a tenured professor at Tulane Law School. "Then, Contegra (suggested by dtSearch) took us over the top. They designed and added features to make it easy for libraries, content owners and creators to use the system. With this final tool in place, we believe this will open up determining the status of art, music, poetry, newspapers, literature and film, for both those hoping the works in the public domain, as well as content owners confirming the status of older works."

"Contegra Systems leveraged the dtSearch Engine APIs and sample code to create a custom easy-to-use interface that supports field searching, date ranges as well as word stemming and fuzzy matching," explains Rob Wiesenberg, President of Contegra Systems. For example, Contegra was able to employ dtSearch's fuzzy searching, adjustable from 1 to 10, to sift through OCR discrepancies, as well as retrieving OCR'ed content along with the original copyright record image for comparison.

To support Durationator's larger enterprise clients, Contegra further developed a batch query option that allows users to submit numerous search queries to the dtSearch Engine in one batch process. The batch processor returns an output file containing the search results along with links to the matched documents, allowing multiple reviewers to quickly examine retrieved records.

dtSearch's core developer component, the dtSearch Engine, works across both offline and online platforms (including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services) as well as a variety of operating systems to instantly search terabytes with over 25 full-text and metadata-driven search options. dtSearch's proprietary document filters support a wide range of online and offline data covering numerous document types, emails plus nested attachments, website data and other databases.

About Durationator®, durationator.com
The Durationator offers lawyers and content owners status reports and legal memos. The company also provides libraries, museums and archives resources for digitization and copyright resolutions. Finally, Durationator gives artists, filmmakers, musicians and scholars copyright status determinations for works that they may want to reference. For more information, or to submit a copyright query, please visit www.durationator.com.

About Contegra Systems, contegrasystems.com
Established in 1987, Contegra Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise search and machine learning data services to small, medium and Fortune 500 companies as well as non-profit organizations. The company routinely undertakes custom development projects involving the dtSearch Engine, and has also developed custom Contegra components that work with the dtSearch Engine, such as a server-side PDF hit-highlighting application, a pre-built faceted search interface and an auto-suggest module.

About dtSearch®, dtSearch.com
The Smart Choice for Text Retrieval® since 1991, the dtSearch product line has over 25 search options for instantly searching terabytes of data. Along with enterprise and developer text retrieval, the company has its own document filters, offering parsing, extraction, conversion and searching of a broad range of data formats. Supported data types encompass databases, website data, popular "Office" formats, compression formats and emails with nested attachments. dtSearch developer SDKs span multiple platforms. Articles further offer step-by-step instructions for using the dtSearch developer SDKs on cloud-based use on platforms like Azure and AWS. The company has distributors worldwide with coverage on six continents. See dtSearch.com for hundreds of reviews and case studies, as well as fully-functional evaluations.

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SOURCE dtSearch