It's Time: Getting It Right on Rights
Description
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) now represents 14.5 million digital items from over 2000 contributing archives, libraries, and museums across the U.S. Contributing cultural organizations have benefited from this massive public project as it has advanced discovery, access to, and lawful use of digital resources. However, large-scale aggregations like DPLA have also amplified existing barriers to the use of digital collections, sometimes to profound levels. Of particular concern is the estimated 100,000 unique rights statements contained in the DPLA database (a unique statement for every 140 records). This jungle of rights assertions has been characterized as bewildering, sometimes inaccurate or false, and very challenging to understand what uses can or cannot be made of retrieved content. In a joint initiative funded by the Knight foundation, DPLA and Europeana have recently established an international rights statements framework (rightsstatements.org) that narrows down to just 12 standardized statements. DPLA therefore aspires to streamline 100,000 different rights statements to 12! Simplifying, harmonizing, and enabling far greater data interoperability are among the goals in doing so. To put local action toward this global initiative, the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL, an inaugural DPLA Service Hub) is launching a Rights Determination and Standardization Pilot Project, with the goal of developing a process and program to engage its nearly 200 Minnesota organizational contributors over time in a review of rights status and implementation of standard rights statements. This presentation will review the rights statements framework; describe the pilot project including education, training; rights metadata advisement and documenting; strategies for implementing standardized rights statements; and outline the anticipated challenges and opportunities associated with this legacy-making work.
Start Date
16-3-2017 1:00 PM
End Date
16-3-2017 2:00 PM
It's Time: Getting It Right on Rights
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) now represents 14.5 million digital items from over 2000 contributing archives, libraries, and museums across the U.S. Contributing cultural organizations have benefited from this massive public project as it has advanced discovery, access to, and lawful use of digital resources. However, large-scale aggregations like DPLA have also amplified existing barriers to the use of digital collections, sometimes to profound levels. Of particular concern is the estimated 100,000 unique rights statements contained in the DPLA database (a unique statement for every 140 records). This jungle of rights assertions has been characterized as bewildering, sometimes inaccurate or false, and very challenging to understand what uses can or cannot be made of retrieved content. In a joint initiative funded by the Knight foundation, DPLA and Europeana have recently established an international rights statements framework (rightsstatements.org) that narrows down to just 12 standardized statements. DPLA therefore aspires to streamline 100,000 different rights statements to 12! Simplifying, harmonizing, and enabling far greater data interoperability are among the goals in doing so. To put local action toward this global initiative, the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL, an inaugural DPLA Service Hub) is launching a Rights Determination and Standardization Pilot Project, with the goal of developing a process and program to engage its nearly 200 Minnesota organizational contributors over time in a review of rights status and implementation of standard rights statements. This presentation will review the rights statements framework; describe the pilot project including education, training; rights metadata advisement and documenting; strategies for implementing standardized rights statements; and outline the anticipated challenges and opportunities associated with this legacy-making work.