Francis Cave is back in front of the podium, speaking with Alex Brown on “Electronic Licensing with XML and Web 2.0 Technology”

“As more and more content is published electronically so the need for controlling access to it has risen. Early efforts in this field focused on copy-protection technologies (DRM), but a more enlightened approach emerges if instead content licenses can be agreed between parties and content then used according to that agreement.”

Growth in digital collections held by various libraries. Demands from members of those libraries to be able to use digital content in new ways; inclusion in course packs, building ‘personal libraries’, scholarly and academic reuse of the results, etc.

Digital collections in libraries (and elsewhere) governed by various – complex – licensing regimes. It is effectively impossible to manage and interpret these licenses, either for a single use or (more difficultly) in recombining disparate resources in new ways. The complexity and opacity of traditional licensing regimes have a detrimental impact upon use and reuse… except in those cases where people decide not to bother looking and just do what they like without reference to any licence (often illegally).

Electronic Resource Management Systems are increasingly being used to manage complex digital collections of disparate resources. There’s an opportunity here to manage the licence terms alongside the content itself.

ONIX for Publication Licenses (ONIX-PL [pdf]); a standard data dictionary and XML (XSD) expression for complete publications licenses. Part of ONIX for Licensing Terms (ONIX-LT) family, and being developed by EDItEUR with funding from JISC‘s PALS2 programme and the PLS. DLF and NISO also involved.

Initial development of ONIX-PL Editor (OPLE) tool using server-side XForms in the guise of Orbeon Forms.

Photo by me.

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