Overview
The issue of Digital Rights Management is a growing concern for academic libraries. The traditional agreements with content providers, allowed for an aggregated approach, and a disclaimer in the catalog to handle the issue of rights. At the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, we deal with multiple content providers. We leverage content from one of the 25 Columbia University Libraries, NYPL Digital, Flickr, and partner institutions to name a few.Each with it's own set of guidelines, and agreements. For the sake of efficiency, we decided that managing these agreements electronically would be the course of action.There are a number of questions you must ask yourself, when taking on a Digital Rights project:
- Will you manage agreements from all vendors, including the ones from inside your own insitution?
- What system will be used to manage the assets?
- How will these agreements be managed?
- What will be the Best Practices for the workflow involved in the project?
- What are the legal ramifications of managing this documentation? In other words, what needs to be presented in case of litigation?
