From Digitization to Generative AI: Mapping Copyright Research Across Libraries, Cultural Heritage and Artificial Intelligence

Copyright shapes how libraries and cultural heritage institutions digitize, preserve and provide access to their collections, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) has added new questions about the use of protected works as training data and the status of machine-generated outputs. This study maps copyright research across libraries, cultural heritage and AI published between 2016 and 2025. Scopus records retrieved through a title-based search were screened following the PRISMA 2020 framework, yielding 465 publications, each coded into one of three thematic strands (libraries and cultural heritage; AI and copyright; both). Performance indicators, Bradford’s and Lotka’s laws, trend topics, a Callon thematic map, and a VOSviewer keyword co-occurrence overlay were applied to a normalized keyword set. Output grew at 22.9% a year, and 45.4% of the documents were published in 2024–2025. The share of AI-related documents rose from 14.0% in 2016–2019 to 75.7% in 2023–2025 (χ2(2) = 110.6, p < .001), whereas only 14 documents (3.0%) addressed libraries or cultural heritage together with AI. Intellectual property law journals and edited handbooks form the core sources, author productivity follows a steep Lotka-type distribution (β = 3.5), and international co-authorship is limited (15.9%). Keyword mapping places library and heritage themes (digitization, copyright literacy, digital libraries) in earlier years and AI themes (generative AI, large language models, training data, authorship) in recent years, connected mainly through general legal terms. The findings suggest that a fast-growing AI–copyright literature has so far engaged only marginally with the institutions that hold and curate cultural collections.