Hello,
As a party with an interest in aggregation issues for repositories
(mainly for HE in the UK, but more generally as well), I have some
queries regarding the rights attached to metadata records made available
through repositories and how these are shared.
The OAI-PMH made provision for an optional <about> element to be
included in metadata records exposed by repositories, described in the
Implementation guidelines [1] Section 3.4 as:
"A record may contain <about> containers that provide information about
the <metadata> part of the record. It is expected that community
specific standards may arise in addition to the following specifications:
<snip>
rights: a specification for conveying rights expressions that pertain to
the <metadata> part of the record."
There are further implementation guidelines for OAI-PMH relating to
rights declarations for metadata, explaining differences between
declaring rights at repository and record level. [2]
Some initial research has revealed that a couple of repositories (at
least) make declarations about the rights to the metadata at a
repository level, for example ECS at Southampton gives rights of re-use
to the metadata including for commercial purposes, in the Identify
response[3], while DSpace@Cambridge restricts commercial use [4]
I would be interested in hearing from repository managers where and how
similar rights statements are made, and particularly if any repositories
expose a <rights> elements relating to the metadata (or other form of
declaration) using the <about> section of the XML record released to
harvesters ie record-level rather than repository-level declarations.
Our initial research seems to suggest that there is poor take up of the
<about> section of the record but I would love to hear of
implementations that use it.
Off-list responses would be fine and I will summarise for the list. If
anyone else has already studied this issue we would be very glad to hear
of that too of course.
Monica Duke (UKOLN) on behalf of RepUK project
[1] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines.htm
[2] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-rights.htm
[3] http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=Identify
[4] http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/about/policies.html#metadata
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