I moderated a panel in the afternoon on open bibliographic data. I couldn’t also live blog it.

Paul Keller talks about Europeana’s way of handling public domain material. They have non-binding guidelines, explaining the legalities as well as setting a set or norms (“Be culturally aware,” etc.). Europeana lets you filter based on rights restrictions. He shows a public domain calculator that follows a complex decision chart to decide if something is in the public domain, based on the copyright rules of thirty countries.

Q: Our biggest problem is having the providers give us the license data in the first place.
A: Europeana ingested rights info from the beginning (from the dc:rights field).

Q: What claims are Europeana making about what’s contributed to it? Are you assuming any liability? And are you asserting any moral rights?
A: Europeana doesn’t host the content so it does not assert any rights. The public domain calculator does notice jurisdictions where moral rights are asserted, at the end of the process it warns you that there may be a claim of moral rights.

John Weise of U. of Michigan and Hathi Trust on “determining rights and opening access in Hathi Trust.” He manages the digital library production service at U. of Mich. Hathi Trust has 8.6M volumes, 2.2M in public domain, 4.7M book titles, and 210,000 serial titles. It has a steep and steady growth rate. They’ve had 5,000 rights holders agree to open up their works, and very very who had registered take-down notices. They have 18 staff members reviewing books published between 1923 and 1963. They’ve reviewed 135K, and found half to be in the public domain. He urges libraries to make full use of Fair Use.

Hathi Trust is starting a project to identify orphaned works (in copyright but rights-holders can’t be reached). They are establishing best practices, and also trying to find the rights-holders for works published between 1923 and 1963.

Paola Mazzucchi from ARROWS Rights talks about ARROW. ARROW “is a comprehensive system for facilitating rights information management in any digitization program supporting the diligent search process” for the rights-holders of orphan works. To manage licenses, you have to manage rights. To manage rights, she says, you need to involve the entire value chain and to bridge all the gaps: cultural gaps among stakeholders, interoperability gaps, etc. “If you want digital libraries without black holes, you have to manage the rights info.”

Lucie Guibault says that the most important point is the “human factor.” Europe does not have a Fair Use exemption, so they’re looking to Scandinavia’s extended collective licenses. It provides access to non-members of the collective so long as the rights-holder can opt out. [I hope I got that right.] The toughest issue is getting the license accepted across borders.

Urs Gasser from the Berkman Center. Legal interoperability is important to libraries. The problem is not just copyright law, but also the private contractual agreements libraries enter into with content providers. Two important words: Transparency. Collaborative processes. He offers some observations. First, it’s important to look at history, but also not to learn the wrong lessons. Second, the participants in the DPLA have many different, conflicting interests. Finally, we need to be able to answer precisely the question about the value DPLA has brought, and we need to be communicating well, starting now.

Categories: libraries dw