The Copyrights Chain in the Digital Curation Process

“Which Copyright” Project at the Nazarian Library, University of Haifa

Abstract

The internet era, open access movement, image sharing platforms, and mainly the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) emphasise the importance of providing moderated access and licences for the reuse of collections by memory institutes as a key step in the digital curation process.

Trusting individuals to control their data and its (re)use was an important concern since the early establishment of the digital collections in 1998 at the University of Haifa Library. However, there were no specialised tools for keeping the owner’s copy of rights, which led to the use of the note field in the metadata record.

This brief report will describe the experiences in a recent ongoing project to enrich the University of Haifa’s digital collections with clear copyright status, with preference to open Creative Commons licences to benefit the user and the owner’s experiences.

The steps performed will be explored as part of the workflow designed for the ‘Which Copyrights’ project 2024–2025. The scope of the project includes approximately 80,000 bibliographic records and more than 200,000 digital representations, covering local cultural heritage data. Within 7 months, over 52,000 records containing approximately 100,000 digital objects have been processed and are available with the copyright’s representation notice online. In total, 25% of those records have been updated with CC BY 4.0. The success encouraged the design of the next step, to use a public platform to make the dataset available for the public. The Digital collection of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa offers an open access portal, primarily used by the academic community. Therefore, visibility and usage will be expanded to a broader public, including via non-academic platforms, such as Wikipedia or Wikimedia. By sharing these plans, ideas, and ongoing actions, the library experience could be useful to other institutions that work with digital heritage collections, for the benefit of researchers and the broader public.