The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) believes that everyone should be able to access - and, whenever possible, reuse - cultural heritage materials made available online. Currently, there is no international approach to rights statements that works for every institution, leading to a confusing proliferation of information. Europeana and DPLA, along with a community of internationally recognized experts in intellectual property, technology, and metadata known as the International Rights Statement Working Group (IRSWG), have been working together to improve these possibilities through the development of minimum, baseline standards in expressing intellectual property status for organisations that contribute to metadata aggregators. The rights statements under development are intended to be understood by both machines and humans, making the concepts around copyright clear and understandable to all. By doing that, we can educate and encourage people to use cultural heritage material to the fullest extent possible while still respecting its legal copyright status.
This presentation will focus on the analysis of the rights statements for in metadata aggregated by DPLA as a large-scale cultural heritage aggregator. Our research has uncovered that there is considerable diversity within those rights statements represented in DPLA's data set, which will need to be reconciled to adopt a framework such as that under development by IRSWG. The presentation will also briefly describe the IRSWG’s development controlled vocabulary modeled using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), and potential ways which existing “legacy” rights statements can be reconciled with this vocabulary. This research, and the work of the IRSWG, has been generously funded through the Knight News Challenge, a program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
About the Author:
Mark A. Matienzo is the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America, and focuses on promoting and establishing digital library interoperability at an international scale. Prior to joining DPLA, Mark worked as an archivist and technologist specializing in born-digital materials and metadata management, at institutions including the Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, and the American Institute of Physics. Mark’s current projects include serving as the project director for Hydra In A Box (a software development project in collaboration with Stanford University and DuraSpace, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services). Mark’s previous projects include serving as the technical architect for the ArchivesSpace planning grant and implementation grants, and as lead digital archivist for AIMS (Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship), a collaborative project between University of Virginia, University of Hull, Yale University, and Stanford University. Mark received a MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information and a BA in Philosophy from the College of Wooster, and was awarded the Emerging Leader Award of the Society of American Archivists in 2012.
