(23 June 2014, Boston) The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has received USD300,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge, an open contest seeking ideas that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation. Selected from more than 650 applicants, DPLA’s “Getting it Right on Rights” project will create a simplified and more coherent rights structure for digital items, making access to, and use of, items found in large-scale digital collections like DPLA easier and more straightforward for users.
The project will involve international meetings, led by DPLA and Europeana, the pan-European digital library, involving domain experts who have a deep understanding of both the legal and content sides of this burgeoning field, including library and museum leaders, intellectual property lawyers, copyright officers, policy advisors, metadata specialists, and web technologists. DPLA will then work with these partners to set up a neutral namespace with an agreed-upon set of rights designations that will serve as complement to the similarly recognized Creative Commons designations. The goal is to make these designations an internationally recognized standard, which will encourage widespread adoption. Finally, DPLA and its project partners will produce a best practices guide that institutions around the world can use to safely make more content available to the public.
The announcement is here.
