Sometimes projects take a long time to come to fruition. An excellent (and recent) example of this is the Terms of Use and Re-Use for Finding Aid Metadata project which was launched late in 2015. At its heart the project had two goals:
- to reveal the problems that may arise when clear term for use and reuse are not articulated for archival collection descriptions and;
- to suggest a remedy.
Now, some years later, we can declare victory on both fronts! This group was able, through presentations at meetings and conferences, persuade the archival community of the need to make terms of use unambiguous, and in April 2018, after wending its way through a variety of standards and technical hurdles, a new element, <rightsdelclaration> was added to Encoded Archival Description Version 3. This element will allow institutions to unambiguously declare the rights associated with a given finding aid.
This project was started by the program officer Jennifer Schaffner and included a wide range of team members and expert consultants. Our thanks to them for helping to discuss and articulate the problem, as well as contributing to the solution. For more on this project, you can check out the (now archived) project page. An article (Time to Open Up!) published in Archival Outlook written by Heather Briston and myself also helps to articulate the problem.
We hope that both broader understanding of the issues that can occur when rights for a collection description are not articulated and a ready solution for declaring those rights will lead to greater re-use of the valuable information contained in archival finding aids.
Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.