Managing Cultural Content Lifecycles in the UK public sector: Tracing flows of value, licences and content

Despite the abundance of EU and Member States funded initiatives for digitising digital content, little thought has been given to the ways in which such content is managed in order to maximise cultural and economic gains. Digitisation initiatives are mostly seen as isolated activities that do not feed into the broader ecology of institutions that share and re-use content. In addition, the focus of most of the initiatives, particularly of the first generation of digitisations was on the content and not on its documentation and semantic representation. As a result, even in the cases where content is legally and technically available for sharing and reuse, it is not easy to find and combine.

Objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the management of flows of rights, value and content (including meta-data) in order to maximise its accessibility and reuse. The study draws on an ongoing research project investigating management processes in the UK public sector and produces a series of recommendations for policy makers, funding bodies and individual organisations.

The most important of such recommendations have are as follows:

Funding Bodies

1. Take into consideration the implications of rights clearance when drafting the funding contracts.

2. Provide specific funding for the production of IPR and risk-management toolkits as well as targeted IPR clearance training:

- Risk-management approaches need to be developed in the form of ready-made toolkits (such as the SCA IPR Toolkit)

- Risk-management training is required not only for the staff of organisations managing IPR but also for users performing clearance procedures

3. Create specific funding programmes for increasing the IPR management capacity of public-sector organisations.

Public Organisations managing e-Content

1. Develop your own risk mitigation and management procedures.
2. Develop your own IPR training material or customise the existing ones.
3. Train your personnel on IPR-related issues.

- Training should be of variable levels depending on the familiarity of the personnel with IPR issues

- There should be specific training on risk-management approaches and the use of Open Licensing schemes

4. Educate your user base on the Do’s and Don’ts in relation to the content you make available.

5. Have an explicit and clear IPR policy and appropriately communicate it to your personnel and users

6. Make sure that the End User Licence Agreements terms and conditions are understood by your users:

7. Think of uses of your e-content beyond the boundaries of your own organisation or project:

- Repurposing projects

- Walled garden projects (check funding agreements) - custom made licences/ consortium agreements

- Open projects - standard licences

- Cluster with other organisations or projects and agree on common licensing policies for the linking and reuse of content

- Create interoperable and voluntary copyright registries.

8. Create value-added services for Web 2.0 and open content by considering the following issues:

- Track reuse of material

- Record reuse patterns

- Monitor the quality of reused content

- Assist in the improvement of the quality of open content and open source development processes
9. Establish:

− Prior informed consent protocols

− Mechanisms for the protection of minors and

− Personal data retraction procedures

Policy makers

1. Establish a uniform licensing policy for content produced within the public sector:

- There needs to be an obligation of all public-sector organisations to make licensing terms of use of their e-content explicit and clear

- When the licences allow repurposing of content, such licences should be compatible with each other
2. Consider how the Copyright legislation could be amended to accommodate the digitisation and dissemination of high volume, high cultural/cultural/ low commercial-value works belonging to authors whose identification poses significant challenges.

3. Develop an one stop shop rights clearance and registration service for e-content produced by public-sector organisations:

- Establish procedures for all public-sector organisations for registering their content

- Make available a free or low-cost rights clearance service to all small and medium public-sector institutions