Rights Metadata in the Digital Age

To explore current rights metadata and associated software for 'self-archived' and/or multi-institutional disciplinary repositories and advise DLIST, I have explored many resources. These include:

• To date, Project Romeo has completed one of six final reports. There is not yet enough posted data from this project to derive a useful framework to apply to DList. Project Romeo is primarily concerned with creating the metadata elements needed for rights management in self-archiving.
• A great source of information about self-archiving and the principles behind the digital libraryt framework is e-prints. The e-prints FAQ is an excellent source for information about the legalities of self-archiving, as well as its benefits to the readership.
• Additional sources which I investigated are:
  • DPRL

    "The Digital Property Rights Language (DPRL) 'is a computer-interpretable language, developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center under the leadership of Mark Stefik. DPRL is intended to support commerce in digital works, that is, publishing and selling electronic books, digital movies, digital music, interactive games, computer software and other creations distributed in digital form. [DPRL] is also intended to support specification of access and use controls for secure digital documents in cases where financial exchange is not part of the terms of use. One of the goals of DPRL in digital property rights is to develop an approach and language that can be used throughout the publishing industries and other industries as well.'"

  • OASIS

    OASIS, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, "define(s) an industry standard for a digital rights language that supports a wide variety of business models and has an architecture that provides the flexibility to address the needs of the diverse communities that have recognized the need for a rights language."

  • ODRL

    The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Initiative is an international effort of Supporters aimed at developing an open standard for the Digital Rights Management sector and promoting the language at numerous standards bodies.
    The ODRL specification supports an extensible language and vocabulary (data dictionary) for the expression of terms and conditions over any content including permissions, constraints, obligations, conditions, and offers and agreements with rights holders.
    The ODRL specification is freely available and has no licensing requirements.

  • PRISM

    "PRISM [Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata]is a metadata specification originally intended for use in the magazine industry, where production, repurposing, aggregation, syndication, and archiving are topics of interest. Its utility extends beyond that industry, to any organization that needs to develop such functionality. Rather than reinvent the wheel, PRISM recommends certain practices, such as the use of XML, namespaces, RDF, and the Dublin Core. It then defines a few extra namespaces for more specific information. The 1.0 version of the specification is available from www.prismstandard.org."

  • XrML

    "Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML): 'The Digital Rights Language for Trusted Content and Services'. Web site description: 'XrML provides a universal method for securely specifying and managing rights and conditions associated with all kinds of resources including digital content as well as services... XrML 2.0 is extensible and fully compliant with XML namespaces using XML schema technology. XrML 2.0 extensions can be designed for specific industries or with the inclusion of other elements, such as resource-level metadata standards like ONIX and RDF. In addition, standards such as XSLT and XPath have been employed in XrML, and XML Signature and XML Encryption have been used for authentication and protection of the rights expressions. This extensibility makes the language scale with the complexity of business models captured. XrML 2.0, the latest release announced on November 26, 2001, can be used in content-centric as well as service based business models. Rights and conditions can be securely assigned at varying levels of granularity to individuals as well as groups of individuals and the parties can be authenticated. In addition, the grants/licenses can be interpreted and enforced by the consumption application. XrML is designed to be used in either single tier or multi-tier channels of distribution with the downstream rights and conditions assigned at any level. In addition, the trust environment can also be specified in the language in order to maintain the integrity of the rights and conditions.'"

Each of the above standards has its individual advantages, but no single standard has yet established itself above the others.

An important note is that I have not found software designed specifically for harvesting Rights Metadata. Rather, each markup language is a format from which standard harvesters may compile this information. It is not yet determined which, if any, harvesters can handle Rights Metadata.