Standardized Rights Statements

The collections of the Harvard Library (HL) are deep, broad, and in many cases unique.  Consistent with its mission, HL desires to make these collections as freely and broadly available as possible.  Accomplishing this aim is impeded, however, by incomplete information regarding the copyright status of much of the material.  The goal of the Standardized Rights Statement (SRS) project is to make automated determinations at scale of rights status for all HL cataloged items, whether digital or tangible.

The SRS pilot will result in four rightstatements.org (RSO) status designations determinable via an automated algorithmic decision tree:

1. COPYRIGHT UNDETERMINED        rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/
2. IN COPYRIGHT                               rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
3. NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/
4. NO KNOWN COPYRIGHT               rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/

Initially, these designations will be used to identify a public domain corpus that can be openly shared for use or digitized for such use in a manner that complies with intellectual property rights legislation, regulation, and institutional policy.

More information about the initial SRS pilot project is available in the following report:  Sharing Harvard's Greatest Jewels – A Report on Freeing Harvard Library Digital Collections

More information about the algorithmic decision tree is available in the following report:  Standardized Rights Statement Pilot Project Implementation Guide

CNI 2021 Fall Membership Meeting, 8 December 2021: Automated Rights Determination to Unlock Public Domain Treasures in Library Collections