Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Rights metadata for personal archives
Rights metadata for personal archives
Standards for digital rights management
METSRights
METSRights is an extension schema to the popular METS packaging metadata standard. The XML Schema and examples for METSRights can be found at http://www.loc.gov/standards/rights/METSRights.xsd. There is no separate documentation for this standard, though the schema itself does provide this.
METSRights has the advantage of being specifically intended to express the rights associated with digital objects and has been designed for use with digital library materials. It is divided into three principal sections, although the highest, root, level also has attributes which enables the specification of the kind of rights being described, e.g. copyrighted, licenced, public domain, contractual, or other. The three main sections are:
- <RightsDeclaration> a broad declaration of the rights associated with a digital asset or part of a digital asset intended to inform the user community of these rights.
- <RightsHolder> details of any person or organisation holding some rights to a given digital asset or part of a digital asset. Contains subelements to specify rightsholder details: the name of the rights holder, the name of the person or organisation acting as a contact for the rightsholder, along with contact addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses.
- <Context> describes the specific circumstances associated with who has what permissions and constraints. Given contexts can be related to specific types of individual or institution who may have a stake in a digital object, e.g. academic user, general public, repository manager, managed group, institutional affiliate and others. Specific permissions can be stated, e.g. discover, display, copy, duplicate, modify, delete, print, other; and Boolean values can be used to indicate particular constraints or restrictions placed on users within a given context, e.g. quality, format, payment, re-use, other.
