METS News and Announcements
Draft Rights Declaration Schema is Ready for Review
The METS Editorial Board sees the need for a simple Rights schema
that the METS community could use while the more comprehensive
Rights Expression Language (REL) schemas such as XrML, ODRL, and
others are being developed, and debated. The focus of the simple
Rights schema is to simply declare or document some basic facts
about the digital collections being created and/or included in
institutional digital repositories. To that end, this draft Rights
Declaration schema is offered to the METS community for review,
comment, and discussion. The schema is attached as well as some
sample instance documents designed to illustrate how the schema
could be used.
As background and in explanation of the rationale for the Board's
approach, the following schemas and similar efforts were reviewed
closely: the ODRL REL, the XrML REL, the federated digital rights
requirements as crafted by Mairead Martin from U Tenn, Grace Agnew
from Rutgers, and others, and the efforts by the Digital Library
Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative (DLF ERMI)
to document terms related to licensed electronic resources. Following
the comparison of approaches and metadata elements, this rights
declaration schema focuses upon:
- digital resources owned or controlled by the digital repository
rather than e-resources accessed remotely, formally licensed
and subscribed to by an organization (the area covered by the
DLF ERMI group)
- declaring the rights holders and rights associated with the
digital resources mentioned above rather than trying to fully
express all rights as would a REL designed to be used with a
Digital Rights Management system or product
- simplifying the declaration as much as possible given the fact
that the whole DRM & REL scene is changing so rapidly
This Rights Declaration schema has 3 main elements:
- A simple declaration of type of rights (copyrighted, licensed,
public domain, contractual, other) and the public statement of
that Rights Declaration,
- The naming of the Rights Holder(s) with appropriate contact
information,
- The Context(s) for the rights declaration based on type of
users who have a set of permissions for a digital object or part
of a digital object. If there are any constraints to the permissions,
those are also expressed within the context by listing the constraints
and explaining them in a constraint description element.
The Rights Schema is available at www.loc.gov/standards/rights/METSRights.xsd
Also available are the following example documents:
Please direct any comments or questions about the draft schema
to the METS listserv.
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