A journey into openness: an interview with Connecticut Digital Archive’s Mike Kemezis
Michael Kemezis is the Repository Manager at the Homer Babbidge Library at the University of Connecticut. He is in charge of the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA) and he has been a key figure in CTDA’s adoption of Creative Commons and Rights Statements tools.
In this interview, we explore the process that the CTDA followed to implement Rights Statements and Creative Commons tools, and gain insight on what still needs to be done to empower the sector.
The Connecticut Digital Archive is a preservation-oriented digital repository program supported by the University of Connecticut. Any Connecticut-based cultural heritage institution is eligible to add its collections into the CTDA repository. It currently has 45 members, including museums, public libraries, special libraries and archives, historical societies and academic institutions.
That’s a very large number of institutions to handle! Collectively they hold over 1.5 million discrete digital objects in the repository from over 1,100 collections, counting all individual book and newspaper page files, which make up the majority of content, with the University of Connecticut Archives and Special Collections and the Connecticut State Library adding a large portion of that content.
Tell us a bit about your work, and how did you end up deciding to implement Rights Statements & Creative Commons tools.
As the repository manager, I am the point of contact between the repository and all of our Community Members which includes a number of activities including day-to-day troubleshooting and correspondence with our users, collaborating with our community members on projects for their digital collections, and working on longer term projects and grant opportunities to grow the repository program.
Clear and consistent rights statements for all objects in the repository has always been something on our radar, even when the repository launched back in November 2013, but there were other projects and initiatives that took precedence at the time.
The starting point that got us to implementation was when Greg Cram from the New York Public Library came in June 2018 and spoke about copyright and the RightsStatements.org initiative at our annual meeting in Hartford, CT. There was a lot of interest from our community to join the Rights Statements movement as a result of Greg’s talk, so we formed a working group of interested community members.The working group met a number of times in early 2019 and they tackled questions and possible opportunities concerning using rights statements in the context of our community. That group ended up recommending that we should implement 5 rights statements and the Public Domain Mark for items added to the repository.
From there I took the recommendations and determined how to technically implement the statements for use in the repository. I also worked on our communications strategy around implementation, which included a social media campaign, virtual office hours to answer questions from our community, and writing blog posts about the project.
So now that you have the statements and the tools implemented, how does the data look? How many works you have in the public domain?
Based on the current rights statements provided by our institutions, around 200 objects (less than 1%) have been specifically identified as in the public domain. In order to get a clearer picture of potential Public Domain content in the repository we identified around 20,000 objects that were created prior to 1919 and took a look at their rights declarations. This is not a complete picture, since the PD date is now created prior to 1925, but this is the first step of a major rights review project. The majority of the declarations fell into four categories after we reconciled the data, and you can find out more about rights in the repository in our post Rights Declarations in the Connecticut Digital Archive.
The second part of the project of implementing standardized rights statements is to go back and review collections with our community members to apply the correct rights status to collections in the repository.
What can you tell us about the experience of working with so many different libraries and partners within this project?
One thing that I have found is that different institutions approach copyright from all different angles and different comfort levels. Some institutions are all in on using rights statements as a way to open their collections. Others want to use statements to protect the intellectual property of their collections. And still others are unsure about using standardized rights statements because they may not have a good handle on the status of their collections and items or they are unsure about copyright in general. I don’t blame them because copyright can be very confusing!
We created the CTDA Interactive Copyright Guide to help our users determine the rights status of their objects and learn more about rights statements and other copyright resources in order to cut through some of the confusion and present rights statements in a meaningful way to our users.
What are your major takeaways and lessons learned that you could share with other people working with similar networks trying to make this decision?
I think to be successful in a project like this, you need to understand and appreciate where all of your partner institutions are coming from and listen to their comments and concerns. We have found that all of our institutions strive to do the right thing for their collections, and they look to us for advice. I had to become familiar with copyright and rights resources in order to help our community members understand what implementing rights statements means for them.
Taking the Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians course last summer gave me a great grounding and confidence to support this project. The course also helped me determine what is appropriate and what makes sense to implement in the context of our repository program. Discussions about rights and copyright always come up in meetings with institutions, and having a solid grounding in copyright and CC licenses has been a huge help talking to people about their concerns.
I have also been lucky that Greg Colati, who oversees the repository program, has been behind this initiative 100% the whole time, so there was not much convincing to be done.
Some institutions in the US struggle with the idea of releasing their collections as open access out of the fear of revenue or income loss, for example where major donation agreements exist. What would you say to institutions that are struggling with this dilemma? What arguments worked in the case of the CTDA?
One of the ways we approach talking about adding collections to the repository, which is open access by default, is that institutions are contributing to something greater by adding content to the repository. They are contributing to digital cultural heritage in Connecticut and the United States by being included in the DPLA. We also think that the benefits of contributing to these larger entities and the exposure that it could bring to an institution, especially our smaller partners who do not have the means to support a digital preservation system or program, outweighs the potential risk of lost income.
But we also leave it up to each institution as to what they add to the repository. It is our view that if an institution adds one collection of 100 objects freely open for research but does not add another collection of 200 objects due to copyright concerns, we still have 100 more objects than we did previously.
And then we can show the institution the value of contributing to the repository and also work with them to answer their copyright questions to get eventually get more content into the repository.
What influenced the CTDA decision to adopt and implement RS & CC?
Of course, the desire of our community to adopt Rights Statements and Creative Commons licenses was one of the main drivers in this process. Another major influence that put us on the road to implementation was joining the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a content Hub in March 2018.
We look at other DPLA Hubs like PA Digital and the Minnesota Digital Library as great examples of what can be done by implementing standardized rights statements in a digital repository. We looked at the work they did to start to gather resources and information as well as inform our decisions around implementation.
As for today, what would you say was the impact of the decision?
I think that one of the impacts is that people are talking and thinking about the rights of their collections and what it means to make collections available online. We will really know the impact on our community in a few months’ time, when people have had time to get used to the new changes requiring a standardized rights statement for each object added to the repository.
One of the impacts I would like to see about implementing standardized rights statements is a move towards educating our members about Open GLAM and open access for cultural institutions beyond standardized rights statements. I would like to see our membership engage in discussions around open collections and access with the CTDA, other community members, and institutions around the country and the world.
We have smart, talented, and driven users in our community who I know can contribute their ideas and opinions to the larger discussion about open access in cultural heritage.
Michael Kemezis spoke with scann.
