BETHESDA, MD - May 26, 2005 - A pre-standards workshop held last week by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) concluded sessions with a set of tactical proposals to help resolve problems related to digital rights expression. The workshop raised awareness of issues relevant to the NISO community and stimulated discussion of standardized rights expression among the 50 participants from libraries, vendors, and publishers.
Among the proposals that received strong support were the following:
- Extend the Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI) model to include non-licensed objects and communities in addition to libraries. ERMI, which is designed to encode the terms in license agreements, is an ongoing project of the Digital Library Federation (DLF).
- Create a standardized collection of rights "bundles" similar to the Creative Commons licenses.
- Identify a core set of requirements for rights expression relevant to the NISO community.
- Build a reference model for content providers, libraries and museums that includes a glossary of standardized terms for rights expression.
- Launch a campaign to educate both users and practitioners about rights and permissions. In support of this activity, a short-term goal will be to produce a freely available, basic reference document similar to NISO's very popular Understanding Metadata.
"With rights expression languages and enforcement technologies emerging to control copyrighted content and digital media, NISO members became concerned and formed the Rights Expression Initiative," said Pat Harris, NISO Executive Director. "Our members recognized that the dominant developments in digital rights management may not effectively address the needs and concerns of libraries and other content providers." Denise Troll Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects at Carnegie Mellon University, chairs NISO's Rights Expression Initiative.
Additional information on the workshop is at http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/RE-workshop.html.
About NISO
NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO Standards, information about NISO's activities and membership are featured on the NISO website http://www.niso.org.