JISC Digitisation Programme

When the University of Cambridge, with help from the University of Sussex (and JISC funding), released its Newton Papers, there was widespread acclaim for the resultant website, but also some criticism of their use of Creative Commons.

Some bloggers (here and here) asserted that the (seventeenth-century) documents are out of copyright and therefore should be labelled as public domain.

It seems a common sense argument, but this ignores the actual state of UK and the complexity of digitising fragile material.

UK Copyright law implies that digitised images can create their own copyright, if the digitisation is of high-quality.* A quick snap with a cameraphone of an ancient document does not accrue copyright; but a complex procedure involving conservation, handling, colour calibration, adjusting lighting conditions, careful focussing does create copyright in the resultant digital image. The contextual infrastructure to actually deliver the Digital Library also required serious investment of time and money.

Thus in the case of Newton Papers, Cambridge do have a right to assert Creative Commons over their digitised versions of the papers.

It also should be noted that the Cambridge licence used is still very liberal – as long as you don’t make money from it and attribute the source you can use it in any way you want, including creating derivative images. A few years ago, it was a very rare university that would have gone near such an open licence.

* However, it should be noted that this implication has never been tested in a UK courtroom. It was tested in the USA (in the Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. case), but the result in favour of Corel is not binding in the UK. The dispute between the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery is also interesting in this respect.

The Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property (SABIP) have published a report this week entitled “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” .

The report undertakes a critical overview of the theoretical and empirical economic literature on copyright and unauthorised copying.

This report highlights two issues which are in particular need of further research in order to inform copyright policy:

• How does digital copying affect the supply of copyright works?
• Does the copyright system entail obstacles to desirable aspects of technological transition?

On the issue of copyright and digitisation the report states:  It is certain that digitisation will continue to alter the cost structure and demand for many copyright works and that new related products and services will emerge.

The full report is available to download.

SABIP would be grateful to receive any feedback you may have on the report.

Despite the unbiquitous presence of moving image and sound in much of our daily lives, it has largely failed to make any impact in academic teaching, learning and research.

In an attempt to strengthen the role of film and sound in further and higher education, the Film and Sound Think Tank has recently launched a set of videos.

The films examine the role of audio and visual content in education, and how the protential of this media can be unlocked.

The fourth video is available on Vimeo:

JISC – Unlocking Artists’ Rights – JISC Film and Sound Think Tank

As an aside, it is interesting to note the number of views these videos have had in their short life on YouTube (one of the videos – Using Ausio in education – had 138 views).

While the numbers don’t necessarily tell us the whole story – how long were they viewed? – this may already signal the importance and levels of interest in this topic to the education community and beyond.

There has been quite a lot of information flying around since a Wikipedia user downloaded and then stitched together high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery, before putting them up as a single files on Wikipedia.

The statement from the National Portrait Gallery clears up a lot of confusion and seems quite even handed.

The National Portrait Gallery is very strongly committed to giving access to its Collection. In the past five years the Gallery has spent around £1 million digitising its Collection to make it widely available for study and enjoyment. We have so far made available on our website more than 60,000 digital images, which have attracted millions of users, and we believe this extensive programme is of great public benefit.

The Gallery supports Wikipedia in its aim of making knowledge widely available and we would be happy for the site to use our low-resolution images, sufficient for most forms of public access, subject to safeguards. However, in March 2009 over 3000 high-resolution files were appropriated from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without permission.

The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery’s primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.

Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database.

To date, Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer’s letter. The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia

The JISC-managed Strategic Content Alliance the museum, archive and library sector Collections Trust have issued a survey on Orphan Works – http://surveys.omni-web.co.uk/start.aspx?sid=5DZ6VD

The idea of the survey is to get a sense of the scale of orphans works in the cultural heritage community, which will then act as evidence for more sensible legal framework for rights clearance when clearing works for digitisation.

More detail on the survey is pasted below

The Collections Trust and The Strategic Content Alliance are carrying out research to examine the impact of ‘orphan works’ (works for which the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be traced) on the delivery of services to library, archive, museum and information service users in the UK and other European countries. Background information on the research and its sponsors is provided below.

As part of this research project, we would be very grateful if you could fill out a short online questionnaire. It will take just a few minutes to complete.

As a thank you for taking part you will be entered into a prize draw to win £100 (or the equivalent in Euros), and we will also send you a synopsis of the findings once the research is complete.

The survey is at http://surveys.omni-web.co.uk/start.aspx?sid=5DZ6VD

The closing date for completion of the Survey is Friday 16 January 2009.

Two new resources have been recently launched by JISC as guidance on how to deal with IPR issues in Web2.0 content and on digital preservation, including preservation of user generated content.

The free Web2Rights online diagnostic tool addresses the confusion often found when dealing with IPR in its relation to Web 2.0 within education, and provides a step-by-step user guide to ensure the protection of both their and others’ copyright in using, deploying and repurposing content.

The six minute animation below explains some of the main concepts based on three different user scenarios.

The new handbook created by JISC’s PoWR project (Preservation of Web Resources) offers a wealth of tips and information for web managers, data professionals and those making decisions concerning the long-term preservation of online resources.

With such vast quantities of digital data available on or via the Internet, the PoWR handbook encourages institutions to see the requirement for coherent preservation strategies. Key issues include prioritising what to keep, how to keep it, which preservation policies to implement, the consequences of preservation decisions and how to provide sustainable access for the future.

Not the most fascinating of the blogs this … but nevertheless of some importance.

The image below shows the framework within which the lead institutions of JISC-funded digitisation projects function. it shows how they relate to other partners, copyright holders and to HEFCE (for whom JISC are operating) Having such a frame work in place ensure that once content is copyright cleared and digitised it can be used and re-used within the educational community

The full framework, with an explanatory key, can be downloaded as a pdf file