You may be interested in the following announcement. Please forgive any duplication.
The Canadian Heritage Information Network has recently announced the online publication of A MUSEUM GUIDE TO DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT, by David Green, of Knowledge Culture. It is available at http://www.pro.rcip-chin.gc.ca/sommaire-summary/gestion_numerique_droits-digital_rights_management-eng.jsp (and at <http://goo.gl/dvMp>). Materials from recent presentations on the Guide and the issues it highlights are separately available on the Slideshare website <http://www.slideshare.net/event/museum-computer-network-2010>.
PUBLICATION
The GUIDE focuses on the technical underpinnings and strategic decisions involved in practicing rights management in museums today with the tools currently available. A Survey of Current Practice and a Guide to Good Practice in rights management, captured in a set of Summary Recommendations, the Museum Guide to Digital Rights Management is based on the responses of 17 Canadian museums to a 2009 survey, together with interviews with 25 Canadian, US and UK practitioners in the field.
In addition to charting the impact of digital technologies on streamlining and automating rights management workflow in the museum, the Guide calls attention to the critical role that IP Management now has in the cultural heritage community today. The author maintains that there are increasing pressures for museums to be explicitly clear about the rights they have (and do not have) for displaying and reproducing images of the objects in their collections, and how images of their works can and cannot be re-used by the museum, commercial entities and the public.
The World Wide Web is largely responsible for the shift from institutions' concern for the comparatively few images captured from a museum's collection for catalogs and art books, to the expectation that a museum’s entire collection will be photographed, cataloged and posted online.
The first section of the CHIN Museum Guide to Digital Rights Management is retrospective review of rights management through various technical means, from the rise of computerization, through to early collections management systems, digital asset management systems and end-to-end rights management systems.
The second section, reviewing current practice and extrapolating good practice in museum rights management, is organized around the rights management workflow, from assessing the intellectual property that the museum owns or needs to acquire permission to use, through recording and tracking the status of those IP rights, to licensing IP to third parties and recording and tracking those licenses. Each section is followed by succinct recommendations.
PRESENTATIONS
Supporting the publication of the Museum Guide to Digital Rights Management are materials from the 2010 Museum Computer Network (MCN) Conference panel session, "COPYRIGHT & TECHNOLOGY."
* David Green's presentation on the Guide, <
http://www.slideshare.net/redgen/museum-guide-to-digital-rights-management>, together with a transcript at <
http://www.slideshare.net/redgen/museum-guide-to-digital-rights-management-talk-transcript>.
* Deborah Wythe's "Rights Transparency: The Brooklyn Museum's Copyright Project," at <
http://www.slideshare.net/dwythe/mcn-2010-brooklynmuseumcopyrightprojectwythe-5634335>.
* Alan Newman's "Digital Asset Management + Image Intellectual Property Management," at <
http://www.slideshare.net/alannewman/newman-damip-mcn2010>.
* Jeff Sedlik's "PLUS," presented by Alan Newman, at <
http://www.slideshare.net/alannewman/plus-newman-mcn-2010>, and
* Darci Vanderhoff's, "The Phillips Collection, Watermarking using Digimarc," at <
http://www.slideshare.net/darcivan/the-phillips-collection-watermarking-using-digimarc>.
The two-page set of Summary Recommendations drawn from the Guide will shortly be available on the CHIN website and can be found, for the time being, at the Slideshare site:
http://www.slideshare.net/redgen/recommendations-5636582.
David Green is Principal at Knowledge Culture; Deborah Wythe is Head of Digital Collections and Services, The Brooklyn Museum; Alan Newman is Chief, Digital Imaging & Visual Services, The National Gallery of Art and a PLUS Boardmember; Jeff Sedlik is President & CEO, The PLUS Coalition; and Darci Vanderhoff is CIO, The Phillips Collection.