Seeking New Landscapes

Publiziert unter http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/

Zusammenfassung:

"Background
Libraries, archives and cultural institutions throughout Europe have a responsibility to preserve and provide access to their collections for the public good. In order to achieve these goals in today’s Internet enabled society they are striving to digitise their collections and make them available online. As recently expressed to the European Commission in the Comité des Sages report ‘A New Renaissance’*, the benefits of doing so are great: citizens are able to access material that would otherwise be unavailable to them due to geographic location; economic growth is stimulated through the wide accessibility of cultural goods; and innovative ways of interpreting and building on knowledge and creativity are enabled through technological means.

However there are a number of challenges in mass digitisation of cultural materials that must be addressed if a significant proportion of Europe’s culture is to be made available online. Perhaps one of the most critical of these is the process around identification and clearance of rights in material within the last 140 years. Much of this  material remains in copyright, meaning it cannot be made available without permission from the rightsholder, although the vast majority of this in-copyright material is no longer in commerce, or was never intended for commercial purposes in the first place. This creates a complex and costly proposition for cultural institutions who find themselves using rights clearance channels and methodology primarily created for commercial negotiations relating to the reuse of individual or very small numbers of copyright works.

This complexity is compounded by the number of ‘orphan works’– those copyright works for whom the owner is untraceable – that are held within cultural institutions’ collections. As it is not possible to gain the rightsholder’s permission to digitise the content it is not possible to digitise the material without effectively breaking the law. This study was undertaken by the British Library as part of a wider pilot undertaken by the EU funded ARROW** project team. The ARROW system is a network of databases and rights registries designed to enable the identification and rights clearance of works to support mass digitisation throughout Europe. One of its key functions is to support Europeana, the European Commission backed “digital library.” The project is a cooperation between libraries and rightsholder groups to find technological solutions to the challenges that clearing rights for mass digitisation presents."