the role of the NSZL in the project

The Role of the NSZL in the project

NSZL participates in the tasks of all working groups. Its main task is to design and develop a copyright clearance documentation tool within its working group (WG6) that simultaneously fits the national library’s own systems and takes into account the interoperability requirements of partner institutions.

WG6 TASKS

Identifying requirements of technical infrastructure for legally appropriate documentation of rights clearance activities.
Specifying requirements of implementation of rights clearance documentation tool into other workflows and environments.
Implementing and testing rights clearance documentation tool.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE TASKS OF OTHER WGS

WG 1 – Project and consortium management
The 15 project managers, including the EODOPEN project manager of the NSZL, jointly participate in the work of project management, consortium management, and financial management.
WG 2 – Communication, dissemination
Communicating and disseminating our results is both our common task and our common interest. Our current website serves this goal as well. Our responsibility is to outreach as many people as possible, and make them aware of the goals of the EODOPEN project and to be able to deliver the project’s services to a large number of users.
WG 3 – Quality Assurance
We will be involved in the tasks of the quality assurance working group during the evaluation based on the evaluation plan, after the preparation of the systems.
WG 4 – Digital Service Development
The task of the working group is to evaluate the technical solutions currently in use, to develop current workflows and other processes in order to make digital objects accessible to people with limited access (eg visually impaired, blind); NSZL project team also participated in the dissemination of the questionnaire developed for this purpose, helping the work of WG4 with our answers.
WG 5 – Rights Management Support
The specification and development of the rights clarification documentation tool to be created as the task of our working group is closely related to the support of the rights management process defined by WG5.
WG 7 – Digitization, developing a common portal
The task of the working group is digitization and making available to a wide European public of literary works originated in the 20th és 21st century and remained digitally hidden. NSZL is actively involved in this task. Our digitization department will digitize 1,000 rights cleared works from the 20-21st century by the end of next year, and, with the help of our IT Development Department, ensures its publication on the common portal created by the working group.

What happend so far...

As a part of its new library platform under development, National Széchényi Library is going to implement a specific module in order to manage accesses to the contents of its digital library. It is obvious that processes of copyright clearance need to be documented in such a module. As a result of participation in EODOPEN we redesigned our system in order to make the requirements meet with those of the Rights Clearance Documentation Tool (RCDT) that is going to be developed in the framework of the project. When designing this tool the aim of Europe-wide application, therefore a quite high level of flexibility should be taken into account.

IDENTIFYING REQUIREMENTS

A questionnaire was sent to project partners to identify requirements. We asked them about the copyright clearance workflow applied in their institution. Workflow implemented at our library was attached to the questionnaire to serve as a guideline in responding. We also asked them about the legislative background of rights clearance and the data models considered to be implemented when developing RDT. We needed to clarify as well if the system to be designed should include licence management with its full documentation (incl. contracts and emails with right holders, etc.) and registering Creative Commons licences and Open Access declarations too.

BUILDING A COMMON WORKFLOW

Responses provided by our project partners have been analysed and integrated into the common workflow of copyright clearance which is an important component of the specification under construction.

Partners mainly agreed on the metadata elements and value vocabularies to use in the documentation tool.

In the questionnaire we asked partners about the existence and feasibility of Books In Print databases in the relevant countries and we got to know that it is not a typical service in the region covered by project members. There is such a system in German-speaking countries (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher (VLB): www.vlb.de) which plays an important role in identifying and making available out-of-commerce works. The National and University Library in Slovenia also recognized the importance to establish and maintain a BiP service (Knjige v tisku: https://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/viri/knjige-v-tisku), while in Hungary a database for managing data about availability of books is just under construction (https://opusnet.hu/). A new law forced national libraries in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to develop a sort of inverse of Books In Print databases which are for maintaining data on out-of-commerce works.

OOC WORKS AS A NEW PERSPECTIVE

As far as providing legal access to digitized contents is concerned, existence and usability (e.g. queryability through standard interfaces) of Books in Print databases involving access data on in-commerce works became crucial as so called DSM directive came into force. The full title of the document is “Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32019L0790). Adoption of the Directive by Member States might make copyright clearance procedures much simpler.

“Member States shall provide that a collective management organisation, in accordance with its mandates from rightholders, may conclude a non-exclusive licence for non-commercial purposes with a cultural heritage institution for the reproduction, distribution, communication to the public or making available to the public of out-of-commerce works or other subject matter that are permanently in the collection of the institution, irrespective of whether all rightholders covered by the licence have mandated the collective management organisation …” (Article 8, 1.)

At the first period of the project we were not aware of what requirements the law would specify for identification of an out-of-commerce work, but it was anticipated that the requirements would be much simpler than those applied for orphan works. The original goal of EODOPEN was to support workflow for diligent search which needs to be conducted in order to identify a work as an orphan one, this goal seems to require a reconsideration.

The following illustration shows how data of works identified as orphan by diligent search is uploaded to the database maintained by European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), how this data is registered, after being forwarded by the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO), in the database, and how orphan works become freely accessible by beneficiary institutions such as libraries.

NSL has been cooperating with EUIPO since years in the field of technical development in order to provide interoperability between their systems. In harmony with DSM Directive, data on OOC works can be accessible through a database maintained by EUIPO. According to the OOC regime, come into force in June of 2021, a work registered in EUIPO database is allowed to make digitally available six months after its registration as out-of-commerce work. In the meantime, rightholders have the possibility to exclude their works or other subject matter from the licensing mechanism set out in the Directive without any consequences, i.e. without their work being made available by CHIs.

The schematic figure of workflows supporting e-library services according to the concept of technical implementation of OOC regime in Hungary:

Systems supporting workflows outlined above need to be flexible enough in order to help stakeholders in exercising their interests in an effective way, whether they are rightholders wanting to track the distribution of their works, or content providers focusing on the credibility and promptness of copyright clearance. As a conclusion, both systems maintained by EUIPO and solutions developed in the framework of EODOPEN project need to be interoperable in the sense of the metadata schemes and interfaces for data exchange they apply.

When specifying data elements for Right Clearance Documentation Tool (RCDT), beyond partners’ requirements compliance with EUIPO database also needs to be taken into account in order to facilitate bulk import and export of data on resources already undergone through copyright clearance. Another aspect of high importance can be the possibility of data synchronization with Books in Print databases.

The conception can be realized via different schemas, the one outlined below illustrates only one of the options.

Developing a licence management system needs a deeper elaboration, including clarification of concepts by different project partners.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, we might add that by the current period of the project we can clearly see the direction of developments which need to be refined according to current changes of national copyright laws (mainly due to the adoption of DSM Directive), and the situation implied by new national digitization projects.