Creating Standards for the Book Rights Registry: Using Existing Standards Part 2 – ARROW
In part I of this series, we explored the possibility of incorporating ACAP’s work into a standard for the Book Rights Registry transactions. In this post, we will look at the possibility of incorporating ARROW.
As described by the Arrow website, “Solutions envisaged by [Arrow] include the establishment of systems for the exchange of rights data, the creation of registries of orphan works, information on or registries of works out of print and a network of rights clearance mechanisms. Key to achieving this objective is interoperability, standards deployment and stakeholder involvement.”
According to the ARROW website, the project is funded by the eContentPlus program. The “eContentplus programme is a multiannual community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable.” The program was a 4 year endeavor with a budget of 149MM Euros.
The ARROW project itself has been configured to be a 30 month project which started in September of 2008. The first phase, scheduled to run through September of 2009, is mainly conceptual with the following stated goals:
- Legal framework & Business Models
- Interoperability
- Design of system architecture
The second phase, scheduled to begin in September 2009, seems to be where the real meat and potatos are:
- Set up of right information infrastructure
- Creation of Registry of Orphan Works
- Network of clearing mechanisms
The primary goal of the organization is to establish usage guidelines for orphaned and out-of-print works. A secondary goal is to create a mechanism for establishing a marketplace for rights.
The following section was added to the original post on August 7, 2009
It turns out that ARROW is not a standard per so, but rather a project to help institutions identify the rightsholders of content, and to aid in the claiming of orphaned works.
To help implement this project, ARROW has been working very closely with IFFRO and EDItEUR to develop the ONIX-DS and ONIX-RP standards. Those are subjects to themselves, and will be the topic of future posts.
