Rights Metadata

Rights Data Elements

Work was undertaken by the Rights Management Group to identify key data elements for the description of intellectual property rights for digital library materials. The primary data elements identified are:

• Creator
• Copyright holder
• Date of publication
• Date of copyright
• Date of creation
• Date of renewal
• Publisher
• Country of publication
• Published/unpublished
• Type of resource

These data elements have further refinements:

• Personal
• Creator death date
• Corporate
• Date (all dates)
• Exact
• Estimated

And a key aspect of any implementation of a set of metadata elements for rights will be to capture whether data is:

• Unavailable (i.e. no information on the piece or in the archive)
• No attempt to code (i.e. may be available)

Part of the user services aspect of the digital library metadata will be to connect users to any sources of further information about the rights, or to a person or institution that can be a resource for permissions. Current thinking is that this type of contact information will be provided to users through the user interface. It is not known whether the data will be stored in individual records or if it can be displayed from institution information associated with the digital resources.

Background Information and Further Reading

• Copyright Data Elements for UC Libraries: A Report to Sopag
• Assessment of Common Metadata Formats and Gap Analysis