Emily Gore
Director of Content
Digital Public Library of America
Greg Cram
Associate Director, Copyright and Information Policy
New York Public Library
Dave Hansen
Clinical Assistant Professor of Law and Librarian
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Mark Matienzo
Director of Technology
Digital Public Library of America
For the past 16 months, members of the Europeana, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Creative Commons community have been working together to establish a list of standardized interoperable rights statements to be used by cultural heritage institutions and aggregators of cultural heritage data. This work will culminate in the launch of rightsstatements.org in early 2016. This session will provide a preview of that site and will guide the audience through the statements and supporting technical infrastructure. Europeana, the DPLA and many other libraries, archives and cultural heritage institutions believe that everyone should be able to engage with their cultural heritage online. We can help achieve this by giving cultural heritage institutions simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of works in their collection and how they may be used. These simple and standardized terms we call “Rights Statements.” Providing this information is essential for those who wish to actively engage with the works they find online. Can they use it in a school report? Print it on a tshirt? Integrate it into a commercial app? Currently, there is no global approach to rights statements that works for a broad set of institutions, leading to a confusing proliferation of terms – to date there are over 100,000 different rights statements in the DPLA. Simplifying the use and application of Rights Statements benefits both contributing organizations, which share their valuable collections online through aggregators such as Europeana and the DPLA, and the people who engage with those collections. Thus, our international working group has determined minimum, baseline standards for organizations contributing to the DPLA, Europeana and any other digital aggregator that adopts the rightsstatements.org standard. Rightsstatements.org establishes the vocabulary that every organization can use to talk to their audiences about copyright and related rights in a meaningful way. It provides the technical infrastructure to support the development and adoption of these statements and ensures their ongoing relevance.
http://dp.la/info/2015/10/06/whitepapers-for-establishing-international-and-interoperable-rights-statements-released/
http://rightsstatements.org/files/151002recommendations_for_standardized_international_rights_statements.pdf
http://rightsstatements.org/files/151002requirements_for_the_technical_infrastructure_for_standardized_international_rights_statements.pdf