Digital Preservation and Copyright: An International Study

The aim of the International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation was to review current copyright and related laws and their impact on digital preservation, as well as to make recommendations to help libraries, archives and other preservation institutions sustain digital works. Study partners are based in Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. The study found that, in many cases, digital works are not being preserved in a systematic way. This is partly because digital preservation entails more difficult copyright issues than preservation of non-digital material. All the surveyed countries have some form of exception for preservation activities. However, there is inconsistency in the details between the countries’ laws and uncertainty in how they apply in the digital environment. None of the countries surveyed have a uniform national system yet for collecting digital materials. Technological protection measures and licensing arrangements may, in some cases, present significant practical barriers to preservation. Current approaches to address these barriers are ad hoc and include requesting permissions from individual rights holders and some use of model licence terms that permit preservation. Moreover, as yet, there are no effective solutions to the general issue of orphan works. Recommendations of the study include suggestions for drafting national policies and adapting laws to allow digital preservation to be undertaken as necessary, in accordance with international best practice standards, and for promoting national systems for the collection of digital materials by relevant state and national collecting institutions

Copyright and digital music collections in South Africa.

Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.The crux of the research problem for this study pertains to the fact that, as the world moves towards a digital age, it is imperative that we gain insight into the current copyright laws which govern the transferring of music from the old analogue form to the new digital formats. In terms of the research problem, this study explores the South African Copyright Act No. 98 of 1978 as it pertains to the transferring of sound recordings from analogue to digital format. The study also examined digital copyright laws for sound recordings in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as well as major copyright conventions and treaties as these international copyright laws impact on the South African situation, especially in terms of reciprocity. Furthermore, the study addressed the issue of balancing the rights between copyright holders and the public good in the preservation and dissemination of knowledge in the digital age. The study employed methodological triangulation which included a literature search, a questionnaire and informal interviews. The population constituted 16 music librarians and two legal librarians who were surveyed. Quantitative and qualitative techniques were employed. Considering the size of the population (18) the results of a self-administered questionnaire were analysed using a calculator. Data collected for the informal interviews was analysed qualitatively. The study revealed that music librarians in South Africa are not well-versed in South African copyright law, especially as it applies to sound recordings. Guidelines, based on the South African Copyright Act No. 98 of 1978, and specifically for South African music librarians, have been formulated concerning both print and the actual sound recordings. It is important for the music librarian to take note that the composition of songs in a sound recording has an individual copyright that is separate from the copyright of the sound recording. Further copyrights can also exist in, for example, the sleeve of an album. It is anticipated that the guidelines will give clarity to music librarians on South African digital copyright legislation with regard to sound recordings

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

Preserving Open Access Journals: A Literature Review

This literature review addresses certain questions concerning the preservation of free, born-digital scholarly materials. It covers recent thinking on the current state of preservation efforts of born-digital materials; the range of actors involved in significant preservation initiatives of these artefacts; the perceived barriers preventing open access materials from benefiting from existing preservation efforts; initiatives that may enable local, small-scale preservation efforts to be undertaken; the challenges and opportunities posed to preservation by new models of scholarship such as open access datasets, reference sharing and annotation, collaborative authoring and community peer review. The review identifies representative international collaborative preservation initiatives, describes their goals and results, their specific preservation strategie, and their applicability to the preservation of born digital open access materials

Legal and Policy Framework for Promoting Equitable Access to Documentary Heritage

The National Mission for Manuscripts of India, in association with UNESCO, completed a research study to assist in the development of legal and policy framework and protocols for promoting equitable access to documentary heritage, relevant to India and other South Asian countries. This study report seeks to accurately identify and critically examine the legal and policy framework for promoting equitable access to our documentary heritage. The National Mission for Manuscripts is the most important institution in India creating bibliographic databases of manuscripts and engaged in the conservation and preservation of valuable manuscripts. This report engages with the legal and policy framework which envelops the lifecycle of the Mission’s work: the process of access to manuscripts, digitization of manuscripts and the creation of databases. By critically examining the legal rules in the practical context of the Mission’s work, the research team has put together the first such review of any such initiative in the protection of traditional knowledge in the country. The conclusions of the report are in the form of draft legal agreements and policy recommendations located in the discussion on various parts of the Mission’s work. While this report does not set out to be the final word on these significant policy initiatives, the report definitely makes significant progress in the policy debate and legal literature in this field. This report illustrates working patterns of the Mission within the legal and policy framework in the Country. This report will be a valuable sourcebook for understanding South Asian legal and policy framework for accessing documentary heritage collections. The draft legal agreements and policy recommendations, presented in this report, will also be valuable intervention tools for South Asian countries that share similar legal and policy framework within the sub-region

Video game preservation in the UK: a survey of records management practices

Video games are a cultural phenomenon; a medium like no other that has become one of the largest entertainment sectors in the world. While the UK boasts an enviable games development heritage, it risks losing a major part of its cultural output through an inability to preserve the games that are created by the country’s independent games developers. The issues go deeper than bit rot and other problems that affect all digital media; loss of context, copyright and legal issues, and the throwaway culture of the ‘next’ game all hinder the ability of fans and academics to preserve video games and make them accessible in the future. This study looked at the current attitudes towards preservation in the UK’s independent (‘indie’) video games industry by examining current record-keeping practices and analysing the views of games developers. The results show that there is an interest in preserving games, and possibly a desire to do so, but issues of piracy and cost prevent the industry from undertaking preservation work internally, and from allowing others to assume such responsibility. The recommendation made by this paper is not simply for preservation professionals and enthusiasts to collaborate with the industry, but to do so by advocating the commercial benefits that preservation may offer to the industry

Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report

The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library. The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located. A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world. The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are: The British Library University administrators (registrars) Graduate students and recent PhDs Librarians Institutional repository managers Other e-theses services including: DART-Europe DiVA DissOnline Australasian Digital Theses Theses Canada Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations The EThOS tea

BlogForever D3.3: Development of the Digital Rights Management Policy

This report presents a set of recommended practices and approaches that a future BlogForever repository can use to develop a digital rights management policy. The report outlines core legal aspects of digital rights that might need consideration in developing policies, and what the challenges are, in particular, in relation to web archives and blog archives. These issues are discussed in the context of the digital information life cycle and steps that might be taken within the workflow of the BlogForever platform to facilitate the gathering and management of digital rights information. Further, the reports on interviews with experts in the field highlight current perspectives on rights management and provide empirical support for the recommendations that have been put forward

Data preservation, the new science and the practitioner librarian

This paper outlines the information management principles of the so-called 'new science', and attempts to put these in the context of traditional library and information science principles. It gives a brief review of some work in the area, in particular focussing on the work show-cased by the annual digital preservation conference series hosted by the Digital Curation Centre in Scotland (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/). There is a danger that scientists (as opposed to LIS professionals) will apply the information management techniques of the new science to their own activities inappropriately, especially to research that is best curated as 'old' not new science. This is something on which information professionals are well placed to give advice and make judgements. More practice-oriented research is needed to enhance understanding of how traditional librarianship practices can be applied to the data intensive scientific research carried out by so-called 'virtual organisations'. This paper makes some initial suggestions about how the tools of library and information practice can be related to the 'new science'. In particular, it highlights their relevance to distinguishing between the information management needs of the 'old' and the 'new' sciences: these needs are quite distinct, though easily confused. This paper relates terms from pure science such as the virtual organisation, cyberinfrastructure and e-science to traditional LIS concepts, and tries to create an understanding of the relationship between the two disciplines for the library practitioner