British Library Archive of Sound Recordings (Case study)
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Contents |
OVERVIEW
Intro here
Background
The British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings Projects aim to digitise and make available 8,000 hours of digitised audio freely available to the Higher and Further Education (HE/FE) communities of the UK. The projects are funded by the JISC under its Digitisation Programme. The core objectives of the project are to provide audio material for teaching, learning and research within various subject areas from history to ethnomusicology to science, across the broad range of HE/ FE within a password protected domain.
Key content features
- Multiple types of recordings: (a) unpublished recordings (b) published commercial recordings (c) oral history (d) field recordings (sound scapes).
- Multiple types of works (published and unpublished): subsist such as: (a) performances (b) recorded literary works (c) sound recordings (d) musical works.
- Multiple types of rights: (a) copyrights (b) trademarks (on the brands of e.g. record companies) (c) personal data (e.g. in an oral history recording).
Value gains
- Educational and research value from making various forms of sound recordings freely available to the research community.
- Cultural value from the preservation and dissemination of culturally important content that has not been previously published.
- Increasing the visibility of the British Library archive and attracting a greater audience.
- Allowing researchers to built upon primary material that is now made easily available.
Rights ownership and obtained permissions
Rights are either owned by the British Library or effort is invested to obtain licences from the rights holders.
- The multiple layers of rights subsisting in each work often cause severe clearance problems and result in the emergence of a whole class of works without an identifiable owner (orphan works). More specifically:
- Clearance costs are high and unpredictable.
- The clearance procedure affects the management of the whole project.
- Clearance of rights is important not merely because of the legal liability risks but also in order to maintain the good reputation of the British Library.
Terms of access and use
- The content is made available to the public under two types of agreement, one for the general public and another one specifically for Higher and Further Education Institutions.
- The material that is made available to the general public is licensed under a standard BL licence allowing end users to copy the material for private, non commercial and educational or research purposes. The licence does not permit adaptations or further dissemination of the work.
- The material that is made available to HE/FE institutions is licensed through the Archival Sound Recordings Sub-licence Agreement . Such a sub-licence allows under very specific conditions the copying and the limited distribution and adaptation of the content. More specifically:
- The circulation of the licensed content is allowed but only over a secure network, such as Athens, in the UK and between specific categories of users, as described in the Sub-licence agreement. Authorised users are members of staff and students of the HE/FE institutions only.
- The sub-licence allows only educational and non commercial uses of the licensed content.
- Authorised users, as defined in the sub-licence are allowed to incorporate parts of the licensed content in their own work provided they properly attribute the right-owners and acknowledge the source.
Public performance of the licensed content is only possible to the extent that the relevant additional licence has been provided by the relevant collecting society.
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