From the time a distributed open digital library was a glimmer in the eye of Digital Library Federation leaders, the words "shared collections" rarely appear in DLF writings without being modified by "publicly accessible" or "openly accessible". We are now implementing services for shared collections and asking contributing libraries to sign a submission agreement as we include their collections in Aquifer. The submission agreement is broad and asks libraries to agree to allow both metadata and digital objects to be aggregated within Aquifer. Some libraries have pushed back on agreeing that the objects can be collected and have marked up the submission agreements, restricting aggregation to metadata only. At this point, we can accept the restricted agreements. Currently, we are only aggregating metadata.
However, it is clear that to meet our goal of making material easier to use as well as find and identify, we will need to pool or cache more than descriptive metadata--likely some kind of surrogate for the item, as defined by asset actions. Although it is unlikely that we would need to aggregate copies of the objects themselves, future plans to enable object re-use begin to call into question what exactly we mean when we talk about "publicly accessible" or "openly accessible" collections. Do we mean that anyone can view the object or that anyone can capture the object for educational use or for commercial use? Are there any restrictions on further distribution, re-use or re-mixing?
Within the Aquifer initiative, we are considering a variety of activities to help with definitions, including...Creative Commons licenses. One goal would be to confidently re-expose Aquifer collections as open educational resources....We welcome ideas and suggestions for other activities and approaches we should consider.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/18/2007 12:14:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
