Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Rights metadata for personal archives

Rights metadata for personal archives

Standards for digital rights management

Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS)

The PREMIS Data Dictionary provides a list of elements along with information about how to apply these in order to support the long-term preservation of digital objects. The data dictionary in its entirety is available online, and an introduction to PREMIS in the context of personal digital archives is provided earlier in this chapter.

PREMIS includes a rights entity which is designed to document rights relating to preservation actions rather than to access and use by researchers. It is relatively specific: it allows the expression of a structured permission statement relating to a digital object or collection, which sets out the rights of the repository to undertake preservation activities on that material, granted in a legally-binding agreement by the principal rights holder. It includes elements to record: details of the permission statement; the digital object(s) and agent(s) concerned in the agreement; information about the granting agreement; details of the permission granted, including permitted acts and restrictions; with a start and end term for the grant. PREMIS suggests employing a controlled vocabulary to record different types of act; however, it may be preferable to make a more general statement of permission which encompasses any kind of preservation action which might become necessary over time as technologies change.

Whilst the initial PREMIS Working Group chose only to establish the minimal metadata needed by a digital repository to document preservation-related rights, the Library of Congress subsequently commissioned Karen Coyle to provide a study of Rights in the PREMIS Data Model to inform the PREMIS Editorial Committee in producing its first revision of the data dictionary. In her report, published in December 2006, Coyle makes clear the distinction between rights that have a statutory basis and those that have a contractual basis. She points out that the PREMIS metadata standard relies almost entirely on a view of preservation rights as explicit permissions, whereas many repositories have to rely on copyright law and policy as the foundation for their preservation actions. This is certainly the case with collecting institutions which take in personal archives, where the only contract is usually with the donor of the archive, and many other third party rights holders are represented in the collections.

Coyle recommends the addition of some new data elements to the PREMIS Rights entity to record preservation actions that have been interpreted to be permitted by law or statute; she also suggests including elements to record information about the copyright status of an object, where known. The additional metadata should therefore express: the law or regulation governing the preservation mandate or right, when preservation is done under those auspices; ownership of the IPRs in the resource at the time of entry into the repository; the public domain status of the work; and when preservation is based on a specific permission, details of the permission and its grantor.

Her recommendations include the following:
An <agentRole> element should be added to the PREMIS agent entity. The agent entity can be linked to the rights entity to identify the granting agent involved in any permissions agreement. The <agentRole> element would help to clarify the relationship of the granting agent to the IPRs in the digital object, e.g. they might be the actual rights holder, or a legal representative of the rights holder.

A new element <copyrightInformation> with subelement <copyrightStatus> should be added to the rights entity to allow digital curators to record whether or not a digital object is in copyright, and when the copyright status of an object is unknown. Coyle also suggests providing a more granular record of copyright status by including either:

A new element <permittedByLicense> should follow the copyright element. This would simply contain as subelements the two existing PREMIS elements <grantingAgent> (with the addition of <grantingAgentRole>) and <grantingAgreement>.

This should be followed by a new element <permittedByStatute> to record whether a repository is undertaking preservation actions based on legislation rather than a specific licence or permissions. Instead of an agent, this scenario involves a specific <jurisdiction> (the first subelement) e.g. the UK. The second subelement is <statute> containing two further subelements <statuteIdentification> and <statuteCitation>, to record the law invoked and the specific part of that law on which any preservation activities are being based. The final element <determinationDate> is intended to record the date on which the decision was made to proceed with preservation activities on this basis, e.g. when the copyright status of a work changes as a result of legislative change, or if a work comes into the public domain.

Coyle also notes that currently the final rights entity element (<permissionGranted>) includes the mandatory subelement <act>. The PREMIS Data Dictionary suggests using a controlled vocabulary for the content of this element (examples provided include replicate, migrate and modify). Coyle recommends that this should be more flexible; laws and agreements can be vague and subject to interpretation, e.g. the 'fair dealing' provisions, or a broad agreement with a depositor granting the repository permission to do whatever is necessary to preserve a digital object in an accessible way. She recommends that <act> should either be able to codify generalised permissions like this, or should be defined as optional rather than mandatory.