Only with Your Permission: How Rights Holders Respond (or Don’t Respond) to Requests to Display Archival Materials Online

Archival repositories are increasingly considering mass digitization as a means of meeting user expectations that materials be available online, remotely. Copyright is frequently noted as a significant obstacle to these efforts, but little empirical data exist on the copyright permissions process in archives. This article reports the findings of a study of the copyright permissions process for the Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection at the University of Michigan. Specifically, the study sought to reveal how much effort is required to seek copyright permissions, what the results of those efforts would be, and whether or not there were traits of documents or copyright holders that were associated with accept or denial status. The study found that significant time is required to contact and negotiate with rights holders and that the biggest obstacle to getting permission is non-response. Of those requests that get a response, the vast majority are to grant permission. While few of the requests were met with denial, the data suggest that commercial copyright holders are much more likely to deny permission than other types of copyright holders. The data also show that adherence to the common policy of only displaying online those documents with explicit permission will likely result in substantially incomplete online collections.John D. Evans FoundationPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77412/1/DAkmonOnlyWithYour-Permission_DAFinal.pdf-

Building Tools to Support Active Curation: Lessons Learned from SEAD

SEAD – a project funded by the US National Science Foundation’s DataNet program – has spent the last five years designing, building, and deploying an integrated set of services to better connect scientists’ research workflows to data publication and preservation activities. Throughout the project, SEAD has promoted the concept and practice of “active curation,” which consists of capturing data and metadata early and refining it throughout the data life cycle. In promoting active curation, our team saw an opportunity to develop tools that would help scientists better manage data for their own use, improve team coordination around data, implement practices that would serve the data better over time, and seamlessly connect with data repositories to ease the burden of sharing and publishing. SEAD has worked with 30 projects, dozens of researchers, and hundreds of thousands of files, providing us with ample opportunities to learn about data and metadata, integrating with researchers’ workflows, and building tools and services for data. In this paper, we discuss the lessons we have learned and suggest how this might guide future data infrastructure development efforts.National Science Foundation #OCI0940824Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140714/1/document.pdfDescription of document.pdf : Main Articl

Building Tools to Support Active Curation: Lessons Learned from SEAD

SEAD – a project funded by the US National Science Foundation’s DataNet program – has spent the last five years designing, building, and deploying an integrated set of services to better connect scientists’ research workflows to data publication and preservation activities. Throughout the project, SEAD has promoted the concept and practice of “active curation,” which consists of capturing data and metadata early and refining it throughout the data life cycle. In promoting active curation, our team saw an opportunity to develop tools that would help scientists better manage data for their own use, improve team coordination around data, implement practices that would serve the data better over time, and seamlessly connect with data repositories to ease the burden of sharing and publishing. SEAD has worked with 30 projects, dozens of researchers, and hundreds of thousands of files, providing us with ample opportunities to learn about data and metadata, integrating with researchers’ workflows, and building tools and services for data. In this paper, we discuss the lessons we have learned and suggest how this might guide future data infrastructure development efforts

'Who owns knowledge? Heritage, intellectual property and access in and to the history of Antigua and Barbuda'.

This article traces the history of the so-called Codrington Papers, created by the Caribbean governors of the late 17th century called Christopher Codrington, father and son. Their history as a collection, repositories which hold or have held them, ownership of the physical documents, to the factual information they contain, or to their interpretation is all contested within issues of race, colonialism, politics and intellectual authority