Julia Fallon, Senior Policy Advisor, Europeana Foundation

2019 feels like a big year for our consortium. By the end of this year we will have been operating for three years thanks to an incredible amount of in kind support from our members and supporters. To continue the work that has been achieved in these past few years, we need to move beyond maintenance of the statements and our infrastructure.

Guided by our experiences so far, we know that we are not short of challenges to meet. However we also understand that despite good intentions in previous years, our own structures and resources cannot meet these ambitions. So we’ve scaled back and focused our priorities in 2019 on the most significant challenges for us to meet. Each challenge is led by a member of the consortium and we have set clearly defined targets to help us monitor and transparently demonstrate our progress towards these.

You can read the plan for 2019 here, and below find an update on our progress towards these objectives midway through the year.

  1. Increasing the efficiency & effectiveness of the translation management process graphthinking GmbH were contracted to develop the translations management process and the publishing workflow for the website. As our existing maintenance partner, and a member of our technical working group they are ideally positioned to support this work. In the new process, translators will be able to edit the descriptions of rights statements in their language using a dedicated localization software (Transifex), which will automatically feed into our data infrastructure. The process is developed and is undergoing final tests before being rolled out to translation partners.

  2. Improving the publishing workflow for rightsstatements.org Through the development contract with Graphthinking, we have started work to port the content of the righstatements.org website (including blog posts) into a more user-friendly Content Management System. Visitors to our website should start to notice our content is more to date over the coming months.

  3. Prioritisation of member languages The French translation - developed between partners from Luxembourg, Canada and France - has been published and is available for cultural heritage institutions to apply. The next translations to be prioritised in the publication of Hindi, in support of NDLI’s planned implementation of the statements.

  4. Exploring approaches to expressing indigenous cultural and intellectual property (ICIP) through the rights statements Trove has audited existing approaches to expressing ICIP considerations online. This includes the work undertaken by TK Labels, Local Context, Creative Commons and Murkutu. While there has been development of regional and national level statements, markers and protocols, there is no single overarching global indicator. This global statement is needed to maintain the different nuances of local, regional and national contexts while facilitating global interoperability and a shared global understanding. Stakeholders with an interest in this area, including representatives of First Nations communities, have been identified and avenues to identify funding options to support an in person meeting of stakeholders has been explored.

  5. Developing an implementation package NDLI put themselves forward as a candidate to develop an implementation package, as they worked throughout their network to understand what they needed to do to use rights statements. To support this Greg Cram and Paul Keller will join Dr Partha Pratim Das and his NDLI colleagues in India in September to run a two day workshop supporting local institutions to understand, prepare for and apply the statements.

If you are interested to read more about the plans and activities of the working groups, you can read their individual work plans: