All posts by Maggie Dickson

Announcements, Uncategorized

Introducing DUL’s “Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Library Descriptions”

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Over the past couple of years I’ve written on this blog about the kinds of initiatives libraries are engaging in these days in order to try to wrestle with our past (and sometimes, current) problematic practices when creating the descriptive metadata patrons use to discover and identify library resources. And last spring we hosted an intern in the Digital Collections and Curation Services department, Laurier Cress, who wrote an excellent piece describing her research and investigation into the issues present in library and archival description as well as actions that can be taken to address them.  

One of the first steps that institutions can take is to publicly acknowledge that we are aware of the biases in our cataloging practices and the resulting harmful or otherwise problematic metadata in our catalogs and on our websites, and to make a commitment to remediation. These public acknowledgements often take the form of what is typically referred to as a ‘harmful language statement’ on the library’s website (The Cataloging Lab has created what looks to be a pretty comprehensive list of statements on bias in library and archives description). Last spring, our Executive Group convened a working group to develop such a statement for the Duke University Libraries and charged us with: Using harmful language statements drafted by other cultural heritage groups as a reference, draft statements acknowledging harmful language and content within our collections (digital and analog) and metadata.

The working group started by reviewing the Harmful Statement Research Log Laurier had compiled as part of her research, in which she analyzed the content and presentation of harmful language statements from GLAM institutions. This was extremely helpful to us in determining what we wanted to prioritize and emphasize as we developed our own statement. We met biweekly over the course of a few months, while also working asynchronously on verbiage in between meetings. Ultimately, we decided that we wanted our statement to be straightforward, communicating that we know library description is not a neutral space, that we are aware that harmful language exists on our website, and that we are committed to repairing such language as it is identified. We also wanted our statement to be short – no one likes a wall of text! – and we were able to accomplish this by linking from the statement to lengthier, more detailed statements on inclusive description prepared by our Technical Services division and the Rubenstein Libraries Technical Services department.

We also felt it was important that our statement include a mechanism for soliciting feedback from users, and so we created a Qualtrics form, linked from the statement, that allows people who have encountered harmful or otherwise problematic language on our website to report it to us. Responses may be anonymous, if desired, although it is also possible to share contact information in order to be updated about any actions taken to remediate the language. Both the statement and the form were published this week:

Read DUL’s Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Library Descriptions.

And we’re not done here! A third priority of the working group’s, in addition to the creation of the statement and the feedback form, was to ensure that this work be visible. (E.g., ‘if a tree falls in a forest, but no one is there to hear it fall, did it make a sound?’ is not dissimilar to ‘if a Drupal page gets plopped into a vast academic research library website, but nobody can find it, will it make an impact?’) To that end, now that the statement and form are publicly accessible, we will work to add links to the statement throughout our discovery layer (including our catalog, our digital collections, and archival collection guides) so that users will be able to find it at the point at which they are potentially encountering harmful language. This work will be a bit more complicated than creating Drupal pages and Qualtrics forms, however, so please stay tuned!

Digital Collections, Uncategorized

Casting a Critical Eye on the Hayti-Elizabeth Street Renewal Area Maps

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In 2019, one of the digital collections we made available to the public was a small set of architectural maps and plans titled the ‘Hayti-Elizabeth Street Renewal Area’. The short description of the maps indicates they ‘depict existing and proposed structures and modifications to the Hayti neighborhood in Durham, NC.’ Sounds pretty benign, right? Perhaps even kind of hopeful, given the word ‘renewal’?

Hayti-Elizabeth Street Renewal Area, Existing Land Use Map

Nope. This anodyne description does not tell the story of the harm caused by the Durham Urban Renewal project of the 1960s and 1970s. The Durham Redevelopment Commission intended to eliminate ‘urban blight’ via this project, which ultimately resulted in the destruction of more than 4,000 households and 500 businesses in predominantly African American areas of the city. The Hayti District, once a flourishing and self-sufficient neighborhood filled with Black-owned businesses, was largely demolished, divided, and effectively severed from what is now downtown Durham by the construction of NC Highway 147. 

Bull City 150, a “public history, geography and community engagement project” based here at Duke University, hosts a suite of excellent multi-media public history exhibitions about housing inequality in Durham on its website. One of these is Dismantling Hayti, which focuses in particular on the effects of urban renewal on the neighborhood and the city.

Dismantling Hayti, Bull City 150

But this story of so-called urban renewal is not just about Durham – it’s about the United States as a whole. From the 1950s to the 1980s, municipalities across the country demolished roughly 7.5 million dwelling units, with a vastly disproportionate impact on Black and low-income neighborhoods, in the name of revitalization. Bulldozing for highway corridors was frequently a part of urban renewal projects, happening in San Francisco, Memphis, Boston, Atlanta, Syracuse, Baltimore, everywhere in the country – the list goes on and on. And it includes Saint Paul, Minnesota, the city where, mourning and protesting the killing of yet another Black person at the hands of a white police officer, thousands of people occupied Interstate 94 in recent weeks, marching from the state capitol to Minneapolis, over a highway that was once the African American neighborhood of Rondo.  

Urban renewal projects led to what social psychiatrist Dr. Mindy Fulilove refers to as root shock – “a traumatic stress reaction related to the destruction of one’s emotional ecosystem”. This is but one thread in the fabric of white supremacy out of which our country was woven, among other twentieth century practices of redlining, discriminatory mortgage lending practices, denial of access to unemployment benefits, and rampant Jim Crow laws, which are still causing harm today. This is why it is important to interrogate the historical context of resources like the Hayti-Elizabeth Street Renewal Area maps – we should all accept the invitation extended on the Bull City 150 website to Durhamites to “reckon with the racial and economic injustices of the past 150 years and commit to building a more equitable future”.

Conferences, Uncategorized

Managing Problematic Metadata, Take Two

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Back in August I wrote a Bitstreams post about the various ways by which those of us who work with library metadata could attempt to tackle the issue of problematic descriptions and descriptive standards. One of the methods I mentioned was activism, and I highlighted the documentary ‘Change the Subject!’, which follows the story of students and librarians at Dartmouth University as they worked together to lobby the Library of Congress to stop using the term ‘illegal aliens’ to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Recently, the Triangle Research Libraries’ Network offered a screening of this documentary to its constituent libraries, who were treated to a special viewing (and free popcorn!) at Durham’s iconic Carolina Theater. I attended this screening and participated in a panel discussion following the film.

Image of the Carolina Theater in Durham, NC.
By Warren LeMay – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81937356

I found the documentary to be both encouraging and disheartening: encouraging, as the student activists’ vision, fortitude, and perseverance is inspiring, but disheartening as ultimately, their campaign to have the term ‘illegal aliens’ removed from the Library of Congress Subject Headings failed, due to intervention from Congress.

However, the panel discussion following the screening restored some of my faith that we could still manage problematic metadata with the tools at our disposal. Some of the ideas that were mentioned included:

  • Identifying alternative thesauri and vocabularies that better represent diversity, equity, and inclusion, and being proactive in mapping problematic metadata to preferred terms.
  • Working with library vendors to communicate that this is an issue we care about, and perhaps suggesting the use of more inclusive language in their products.
  • Working with students and student activist groups to collaborate on identifying and remediating areas for improvement in our descriptive practices (as well as library work and spaces in general).
  • Continuing to use SACO funnels – formal channels for submitting subject authority records to the Library of Congress – while recognizing that this is time consuming yet important work.

And, of course, we can use the technological solution we have already developed for suppressing problematic subject headings from the shared TRLN discovery layer (eg, Duke, UNC, and NCSU’s catalog). Work has progressed on developing policies and governance to support workflows for implementing this solution, including the formation of a TRLN Discovery Metadata Team, which will focus on the shared discovery layer, and a more broadly focused TRLN Metadata Interest Group. Stay tuned!

Uncategorized

Managing Problematic Metadata

In April 2018 I attended an excellent NISO webinar entitled “Can there be neutrality in cataloging?”. Initially this struck me as a somewhat quaint title, as though there could be any answer other than ‘no’. Happily, the webinar came to pretty much the same conclusion, and I think it’s fair to say that at this point in time there is a broad understanding in the metadata and cataloging community that libraries are not neutral spaces, and therefore, neither is the description we create, manage, store, and display. 

It takes intentionality and cultural humility to do descriptive work in a way that respects the diversity of our society and multitudinous perspectives of our patrons. I think we’re now in a moment where practitioners are recognizing the importance of approaching our work with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values in mind.

But we must also reckon with the fact that there hasn’t always this kind of focus on inclusivity in regards to our descriptive practices, and so we are left with the task of deciding how best to manage existing metadata and legacy practices that don’t reflect our values as librarians and archivists. So, we have to figure out how to appropriately “decolonize” our description.

Over the past few years I’ve encountered a number of ideas and initiatives aimed at addressing this issue by both reexamining and remediating existing metadata as well as updating and improving descriptive practices.

Institutional work & messaging

We can leverage our institutional structures. 

Activism

We can participate in activism to make broad changes.

  • Students and librarians at Dartmouth University worked together to lobby the Library of Congress to stop using the term ‘illegal aliens’ to describe undocumented immigrants. The documentary ‘Change the Subject!’ describes their campaign.
Programmatic Analysis

We can develop tools and techniques for analyzing our existing metadata.

  • Noah Geraci, a librarian at the University of California Riverside, presented at Code4Lib 2019 on their project to identify problematic metadata and remediate it programmatically.
Implement Inclusive Vocabulary and Thesauri

We can identify and implement inclusive alternative vocabulary and thesauri in our systems.

  • As part of the Hyrax project, developers and stakeholders have identified vocabularies and thesauri that are more inclusive and representative, listed here in a spreadsheet managed by Julie Hardesty.
Develop technical solutions

We can develop technical solutions for managing the presence of problematic metadata in our systems. 

  • And here’s something we’re working on locally! As part of TRLN Discovery (a recent and successful project to develop a shared Blacklight discovery interface for the Triangle Research Libraries Network consortium) developers incorporated code for re-mapping problematic subject headings to preferred terms. Problematic terms may still be searched, but only the preferred term will display in the record. We’re still working out how to implement this tool however, from a policy standpoint, e.g., who decides what is ‘problematic’, and how should those decisions be communicated across our organizations.

This is but a smattering out of many projects and ideas metadata practitioners are engaged in. Eradicating inaccurate, insensitive, and potentially harmful description from our library systems is a heavy and entrenched problem to tackle, but lots of smart folks are on it. Together we can address and remediate our existing metadata, reexamine and improve current descriptive practices, and work toward creating an environment that is more inclusive and representative of our communities.

Behind the Scenes, Technology, Uncategorized

Sustainability Planning for a Better Tomorrow

In March of last year I wrote about efforts of the Resource Discovery Systems and Strategies team (RDSS, previously called the Discovery Strategy Team) to map Duke University Libraries’ discovery system environment in a visual way. As part of this project we created supporting documentation for each system that appeared in a visualization, including identifying functional and technical owners as well as links to supporting documentation. Gathering this information wasn’t as straightforward as it ideally should have been, however. When attempting to identify ownership, for example, we were often asked questions like, “what IS a functional owner, anyway?”, or told “I guess I’m the owner… I don’t know who else it would be”. And for many systems, local documentation was outdated, distributed across platforms, or simply nonexistent.

As a quick glance through the Networked Discovery Systems document will evince, we work with a LOT of different systems here at DUL, supporting a great breadth of processes and workflows. And we’ve been steadily adding to the list of systems we support every year, without necessarily articulating how we will manage the ever-growing list. This has led to situations of benign neglect, confusion as to roles and responsibilities and, in a few cases, we’ve hung onto systems for too long because we hadn’t defined a plan for responsible decommission.

So, to promote the healthier management of our Networked Discovery Systems, the RDSS team developed a set of best practices for sustainability planning. Originally we framed this document as best practices for maintenance planning, but in conversations with other groups in the Libraries, we realized that this didn’t quite capture our intention. While maintenance planning is often considered from a technical standpoint, we wanted to convey that the responsible management of our systems involves stakeholders beyond just those in ITS, to include the perspective and engagement of non-technical staff. So, we landed on the term sustainability, which we hope captures the full lifecycle of a system in our suite of tools, from implementation, through maintenance, to sunsetting, when necessary.

The best practices are fairly short, intended to be a high-level guide rather than overly prescriptive, recognizing that every system has unique needs. Each section of the framework is described, and key terms are defined. Functional and technical ownership are described, including the types of activities that may attend each role, and we acknowledge that ownership responsibilities may be jointly accomplished by groups or teams of stakeholders. We lay out the following suggested framework for developing a sustainability plan, which we define as “a living document that addresses the major components of a system’s life cycle”:

  • Governance:
    • Ownership
    • Stakeholders
    • Users
  • Maintenance:
    • System Updates
    • Training
    • Documentation
  • Review:
    • Assessments
    • Enhancements
    • Sunsetting

Interestingly, and perhaps tellingly, many of the conversations we had about the framework ended up focusing on the last part – sunsetting. How to responsibly decommission or sunset a system in a methodical, process-oriented way is something we haven’t really tackled yet, but we’re not alone in this, and the topic is one that is garnering some attention in project management circles.

So far, the best practices have been used to create a sustainability plan for one of our systems, Dukespace, and the feedback was positive. We hope that these guidelines will facilitate the work we do to sustain our system, and in so doing lead to better communication and understanding throughout the organization. And we didn’t forget to create a sustainability plan for the best practices themselves – the RDSS team has committed to reviewing and updating it at least annually!

Digital Collections, Duke Digital Repository, Uncategorized

Metadata for Homiletics: Enhancing the Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection

In 2016, after we launched the first iteration of the Duke Chapel Recordings Digital Collection in the Duke Digital Repository (DDR), we began a collaborative project between Digital Collections and Curation Services, University Archives, and the Duke Divinity School to enhance the metadata. The original metadata was fairly basic and allowed users to identify individual written, audio, and video sermons based on speaker, date, title, and format. All good stuff, but it didn’t allow for discovery based on the intellectual content of the sermons themselves. So, it was decided that, at the same time Divinity School staff listened to and corrected machine-generated transcripts for each sermon, they would also capture information that is useful from a homiletic perspective.

At the very beginning of the project, the Divinity School convened two focus groups of preachers from a variety of denominations and backgrounds to ask them how they would like to be able to discover and use a digital collection of sermons. These groups developed a set of terms/categories based on which they would like to be able to identify sermons. From there I worked with the project team to begin thinking about what kinds of fields they would want to capture, and determine whether or how those fields could map to the existing metadata application profile that we use in the DDR.

It quickly became clear that this project was going to require the creation of new metadata fields in the DDR application. I try to be really judicious about creating new fields (because otherwise, you end up doing this), but in this case, I felt that the need was justified: homiletic metadata is fairly specialized, and given Duke’s commitment to this collecting area, making adjustments to accommodate it seemed more than reasonable. Since I always like to work with best practices, I attempted to identify any extant metadata schemas that might already exist for working with biblical metadata. I felt pretty confident that I would find one, considering that the Bible is actually one of the oldest books out there. While I did find some resources, they were pretty old (think last-updated-in-2006), and all of them were oriented towards marking up actual Biblical texts, rather than the encoding of metadata about those texts.

Screen capture of the OSIS (Open Scripture Information Standard) in the Wayback Machine.

With no established standards to work with, we set about determining what the fields should be, using the practice of homiletics itself as a guide. We also developed a workflow for the capturing of this metadata, using a google spreadsheet with conditional formatting and pre-developed drop-down lists to control and facilitate data entry. And starting from the set of terms/categories developed during the focus groups, we came up with a normalized set of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) for staff to choose from or add to, as needs arose.

Example of subject headings applied to a sermon, available at https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41r6nf5b

Working with LCSH was in itself a challenge, as it required us to navigate the tension between the need to use a standardized set of headings while also include concepts that weren’t themselves well represented in the vocabulary. In some cases we diverged from LCSH in the interest of using terms that would be familiar, expected, and recognizable to practitioners of homiletics. One example of this is the term ‘Community’, which has a particular meaning in a Biblical context, but which, were we to have used the LCSH term ‘Communities’, loses its intent. 

We rolled out the new metadata properties and values in early August so they could be available for use by attendees at the international homiletics conference, Societas Homiletica, which was held at Duke University August 3-8, 2018. Now, users of the digital collection can facet and browse by: Liturgical Calendar, Biblical Book, Chapter and Verse, and Subject. We’ve also added curated abstracts, and key quotations from the sermons, which are free-text searchable.

New facets!

The enhanced metadata makes for a much more meaningful experience using the Duke Chapel Recordings, and future plans involve the inclusion of sermon transcripts, as well as the development of a complimentary website, maintained by the Duke Divinity School, to provide even more information about the speakers and their sermons. With these enrichments, we are well on our way to having an unparalleled free and open resource  for the study of homiletics, and hopefully, in so doing, we will facilitate the discovery and study of preachers whose voices have traditionally been underheard.

Behind the Scenes, Technology

Mapping Duke University Libraries’ Discovery System Environment

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Just over one year ago, Duke University Library’s Web Experience team charged a new subgroup – the Discovery Strategy Team – with “providing cohesion for the Libraries’ discovery environment and facilitate discussion and activity across the units responsible for the various systems and policies that support discovery for DUL users.” Jacquie Samples, head of the Metadata and Discovery Strategy Department in our Technical Services Unit, and I teamed up to co-chair the group, and we were excited to take on this critical work along with 8 of our colleagues from across the libraries.

Our first task was one that had long been recognized as a need by many people throughout the library – to create an up-to-date visualization of the systems that underpin DUL’s discovery environment, including the data sources, data flows, connections, and technical/functional ownership for each of these systems. Our goal was not to depict an ideal discovery landscape but rather to depict things as they are now (ideal could come later).

Before we could create a visualization of these systems and how they interacted, however, we realized we needed to identify what they were! This part of the process involved creating a giant laundry list of all of systems in the form of a google spreadsheet, so we could work on it collaboratively and iteratively. This spreadsheet became the foundation of the document we eventually produced, containing contextual information about the systems including:

  • Name(s) of the system
  • Description/Notes
  • Host
  • Path
  • Links to documentation
  • Technical & functional owners

Once we had our list of systems to work from, we began the process of visualizing how they work here at DUL. Each meeting of the team involved doing a lot of drawing on the whiteboard as we hashed out how a given system works – how staff & other systems interact with it, whether processes are automated or not, frequency of those processes, among other attributes. At the end of these meetings we would have a messy whiteboard drawing like this one:

We were very lucky to have the talented (and patient!) developer and designer Michael Daul on the team for this project, and his role was to take our whiteboard drawings and turn them into beautiful, legible visualizations using Lucidchart:

Once we had created visualizations that represented all of the systems in our spreadsheet, and shared them with stakeholders for feedback, we (ahem, Michael) compiled them into an interactive PDF using Adobe InDesign. We originally had high hopes of creating a super cool interactive and zoomable website where you could move in and out to create dynamic views of the visualizations, but ultimately realized this wouldn’t be easily updatable or sustainable. So, PDF it is, which may not be the fanciest of vehicles but is certainly easily consumed.

We’ve titled our document ‘Networked Discovery Systems at DUL”, and it contains two main sections: the visualizations that graphically depict the systems, and documentation derived from the spreadsheet we created to provide more information and context for each system. Users can click from a high-level view of the discovery system universe to documentation pages, to granular views of particular ‘constellations’ of systems. Anyone interested in checking it out can download it from this link. 

We’ve identified a number of potential use cases for this documentation, and hope that others will surface:

  • New staff orientation
  • Systems transparency
  • Improved communication
  • Planning
  • Troubleshooting

We’re going to keep iterating and updating the PDF as our discovery environment shifts and changes, and hope that having this documentation will help us to identify areas for improvement and get us closer to achieving that ideal discovery environment.

Uncategorized

Metadata Year-in-Review

As 2017 comes to a close and we gear up for the new year, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the past twelve months. Because we set ambitious goals and are usually looking forward, not back, we can often feel defeated by all the work we haven’t gotten done. So I was pleasantly surprised when my perusal of the past year’s metadata work surfaced a good deal of impressive work. Here are a few of the highlights:

Development and Dissemination of the DDR MAP

Perhaps our biggest achievement of the year was the development of the DDR’s very first formally documented metadata application profile, the DDR MAP. A metadata application profile defines the metadata elements and properties your system uses, documenting predicates, obligations & requirements, and input guidelines. Having a documented and shared metadata application profile promotes healthy metadata practices and facilitates communication.

In addition to the generalized DDR MAP, we also developed a Research Data Metadata Profile and a Digital Collections Metadata Profile for those specific collecting areas.

Rights Management Metadata

It’s been written about on this blog a couple of times already (here and here) but I think it bears repeating: this year we rolled out a new rights management metadata strategy that employs the application of either a Creative Commons or RightsStatement.org URI to all DDR resources, as well as the option of applying an additional free text rights note to provide context:

We feel great about finally being able to communicate the rights statuses of DDR resources in a clear and consistent way to our end-users (and ourselves!).

Programmatic Linking to Catalog Records

Sometimes a resource in the DDR also has a record in the library catalog, and sometimes that record contains description that is either not easily accommodated by the DDR MAP, or it is not desirable to include it in the repository metadata record for a particular reason. It wasn’t in the cards to develop a synchronization or feed of the MARC metadata, but we were able to implement a solution wherein we store the identifier for the catalog record on the resource in the repository, and then use that identifier to construct and display a link back to the catalog record.

And Lots of Other Cool Stuff

There were a lot of other cool metadata developments this year, including building out our ability to represent relationships between related items in the DDR, developing policies regarding the storage and display of identifiers, and a fancy new structural metadata solution for representing the hierarchical structure of born digital archives. We also got to work on some amazing new and revamped digital collections!

Looking Ahead

Of course, we are setting ambitious goals for the coming year as well – plans to upgrade our current Dspace repository, DukeSpace, and implement the new RT2 connector to Elements, will involve substantial metadata work, and the current project to build a Hyrax-based repository for research data presents and opportunity for us to revisit and improve our Research Data Metadata Profile. And ideally we will be able to make some real headway tackling the problem of identity management – leveraging unique identifiers for people (ORCIDs, for example), rather than relying on name strings, which is inherently error prone.

And there is a whole slew of interesting metadata work for the Digital Collections program slated for 2018 , including adding enhanced homiletic metadata to the Duke Chapel Recordings digital collection.

Conferences, Projects, Uncategorized

The Inaugural TRLN Institute – an Experiment in Consortial Collaboration

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In June of this year I was fortunate to have participated in the inaugural TRLN Institute. Modeled as a sort of Scholarly Communication Institute for TRLN (Triangle Research Libraries Network, a consortium located in the Triangle region of North Carolina), the Institute provided space (the magnificent Hunt Library on North Carolina State University’s campus), time (three full days), and food (Breakfast! Lunch! Coffee!) for groups of 4-6 people from member libraries to get together to exclusively focus on developing innovative solutions to shared problems. Not only was it productive, it was truly delightful to spend time with colleagues from member institutions who, although we are geographically close, don’t get together often enough.

Six projects were chosen from a pool of applicants who proposed topics around this year’s theme of Scholarly Communication:

  • Supporting Scholarly Communications in Libraries through Project Management Best Practices
  • Locating Research Data in an Age of Open Access
  • Clarifying Rights and Maximizing Reuse with RightsStatements.org
  • Building a Research Data Community of Practice in NC
  • Building the 21st Century Researcher Brand
  • Scholarship in the Sandbox: Showcasing Student Works

You can read descriptions of the projects as well as group membership here.

The 2017 TRLN Institute participants and organizers, a happy bunch.

Having this much dedicated and unencumbered time to thoughtfully and intentionally address a problem area with colleagues was invaluable. And the open schedule allowed groups to be flexible as their ideas and expectations changed throughout the course of the three-day program. My own group – Clarifying Rights and Maximizing Reuse with RightsStatements.org – was originally focused on developing practices for the application and representation of RightsStatements.org statements for TRLN libraries’ online digitized collections. Through talking as a group, however, we realized early on that some of the stickiest issues regarding the implementation of a new rights management strategy involves the work an institution has to do to identify appropriate staff to do the work, allocate resources, plan, and document the process.

So, we pivoted! Instead of developing a decision matrix for applying the RS.org statements in digital collections (which is what we originally thought our output would be), we instead spent our time drafting a report – a roadmap of sorts – that describes the following important components when implementing RightsStatements.org:

  • roles and responsibilities (including questions that a person in a role would need to ask)
  • necessary planning and documentation
  • technical decisions
  • example implementations (including steps taken and staff involved – perhaps the most useful section of the report)

This week, we put the finishing touches on our report: TRLN Rights Statements Report – A Roadmap for Implementing RightsStatements.org Statements (yep, yet another google doc).  We’re excited to get feedback from the community, as well as hear about how other institutions are handling rights management metadata, especially as it relates to upstream archival information management. This is an area rife for future exploration!

I’d say that the first TRLN Institute was a success. I can’t imagine my group having self-organized and produced a document in just over a month without having first had three days to work together in the same space and unencumbered by other responsibilities. I think other groups have found valuable traction via the Institute as well, which will result in more collaborative efforts. I look forward to seeing what future TRLN Institute produce – this is definitely a model to continue!

Behind the Scenes, Duke Digital Repository, User Experience

Rights Management and the Duke Digital Repository

Last spring, we were awfully excited to see the DPLA/Europeana release of RightStatements.org, a suite of standardized rights statements for describing the copyright and re-use status of digital resources. We have never had a comprehensive approach towards rights management for the Duke Digital Repository, but with the release of RightsStatements.org, we now feel we are equipped to wrestle that beast.

Managing and communicating rights statuses for digital collections has long been a challenge for us. The DDR currently allows for the application and display of Creative Commons licenses, which can be used for situations where the copyright holders themselves can assert the rights statuses for their own resources. RightsStatements.org fills a giant gap for us, in that it allow us to assign machine-readable rights to repository resources for which we know something about the rights status but do not hold the copyrights for. Additionally, these statements accommodate for the often fluid and ambiguous nature of copyrights for cultural heritage materials.

So, it’s been nearly a year since the statements were published, and during that time a community best practice has started to develop. The approach we have decided on for rights management in the Duke Digital Repository follows this emerging best practice, and involves using one field – Dublin Core Rights, as that is the metadata standard our repository uses – to store either a Creative Commons or RightsStatements.org URI, and nothing but that URI, and another field – a local property which we are calling ‘Rights Note’ – to store free text contextual information relating to the rights status of the resource (as long as it’s not in conflict with rights statement applied). Having machine-processable rights statuses means we will have a much better rights management strategy (we don’t currently have a way to report on the rights status of repository materials), as well as the ability to clearly communicate to users what they can and cannot do with resources they find.

Now that we’ve got a strategy for doing rights management, however, we need to develop a strategy for implementing it. We’ll tackle the low-hanging fruit first – collections that have a single, identifiable creator or for which the date ranges put them into the public domain – and then move on to the trickier stuff – for example, collections representing multiple or unidentified creators. Digital collections of archival materials present especially difficult challenges, as the the repository ‘itemness’ is frequently at the folder-level, meaning that the ‘item’, in these cases, might contain works by multiple creators of varying rights statuses (think of a folder of correspondence, for example).

The good news is, there are a lot of smart people working on addressing these challenges. Laura Capell and Elliott Williams of the University of Miami published a helpful poster, Assigning Rights Statements to Legacy Digital Collections describing the the decision matrix they developed to help them apply rights statements to their digital collections, and as I was writing this blog post, the Society of American Archivists circulated their Guide to Implementing Rights Statements from RightsStatements.org (nice timing, SAA!). I’m hoping to find some good nuggets of wisdom in its pages. We feel especially well-positioned to tackle rights management here at Duke, as Dave Hansen, who was deeply involved in the development of RightsStatements.org, joined us as our Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications last year. We’d love to hear from other organizations as they develop their own local implementations – we know we’re not in this alone!