DPLAFest 2017, Brandy Karl

This guest blog post is written by Brandy Karl, Copyright Officer and Affiliate Law Library Faculty @ the Pennsylvania State University, and PA Digital Metadata Team Rights Subgroup Member

I attended DPLAfest in April on behalf of the PA Digital DPLA Hub & PSU Libraries and spoke on a panel sharing the experiences of metadata teams: Managing Relationships, Managing Metadata: Digital Library Collaborations Between Institutions and Across Sectors.  

• I worked with the PA Digital Metadata Rights Subgroup team to present Anastasia Chiu’s analysis of rights statements in metadata associated with PA Digital objects. A few other hubs had the same idea – we all believe that this data is incredibly important to demonstrate our progress, the work that needs to be done to implement normalized rights statements, and to provide a deeper understanding of the overall DPLA metadata analysis, which is tilted heavily towards a few institutions with many DPLA contributions.
• I also presented insights from our work on the Metadata Rights Subgroup – how we share cross-institutional workload and collaborate effectively with different systems and technologies.
• Finally, I called upon the attendees to brainstorm technical ideas to combat static rights statements. That is to say that a rights statement is only good so long as the copyright term status hasn’t changed or the copyright law hasn’t changed. DPLA leadership was excited and I continue to receive questions and interest in resolving this big issue.

Takeaways:

• I was really struck by the multiple structural forms of the Hubs – I hadn’t realized that some hubs had their own staff.
• DPLA is interested in forming a national working group to create Rights Statement & Metadata training, but doesn’t seem to be moving fast. It is my opinion that it should be a separately funded position (to create training); currently, it’s still falling on hubs to build their own, separate wheels (rather than sharing creation of the wheel together). But we are moving forward with that at PA Digital, and I think the Metadata Team’s work is showing true leadership in this area.
• It’s clear that the DPLA is valuable – there were many sessions on the projects that started with access to the materials that DPLA has enabled, with an extremely strong emphasis on social engagement.
• Everyone was very excited about the idea of creating a risk management toolkit. Understanding copyright and convincing administrations that it’s actually not very risky to engage in the sort of digitization most small institutions want to do should be top priority.

Also I had a great time connecting with other PA Digital participants in person! Tara took all the pictures, https://www.instagram.com/p/BTHo07BhauflyaYp1BMqIDbF-1h1VjPr33ZDQk0/ and I think this is the first time my name has been a hashtag!