Thursday, February 26, 2015

Rights metadata

The publication "Rights Metadata Made Simple" offers solid, easy-to-follow, no-excuses advice on incorporating rights metadata into a digital library.  Basing her recommendations on copyrightMD, "an XML schema for rights metadata developed by the California Digital Library (CDL)," author Maureen Whalen includes the following suggestions:

  1. Capture fields such as title, that would normally be included in basic descriptive metadata anyway, in an automated manner if possible.
  2. Capture author information, including nationality, birth and death dates, from an authority file if possible.
  3. If the institution holds both the original work and a digital surrogate, separate rights metadata should be created and the two works should be clearly differentiated.
  4. Use controlled vocabulary to describe copyright status and publication status to ensure that data entry is consistent and conforms if possible to legal definitions.
  5. Recording the following set of data: creator information, year of creation, copyright status, publication status, and date(s) rights research was conducted, allows both internal and external users of the works "to make thoughtful judgments about how the law may affect use of the work."
  6. Researching and recording the rights information for the contents of a digital collection allows libraries, archives and museums to be more "responsible stewards of the works in our collections and the digital surrogates of those works that we create."
  7. Rights information is not static--it may need to be added to or updated periodically; all staff involved in digitization efforts should know who is in charge of maintaining rights information and how to contact them when new information is learned.
As a final piece of advice, Whalen reminds libraries that, while determining consistent local policies for situations where little copyright or publication is known are important, this should not be used as an excuse for delaying--institutions can start by recording the rights information that is already known and deal with the rest over time.

1 comment:

  1. The issue of Rights metadata (and the accompany legal contexts) probably deserves its own course. Wow, it can get complicated ... which is why thanks for the bullet points!!

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