About RightsStatements.org
We believe that everyone should be able to engage with their cultural heritage online, and we are not alone in this - libraries, archives and museums around the world are also looking for ways to improve access to and reuse of their digital collections.
We want to help cultural heritage institutions work towards this vision by making it easier for users to understand what they can do with a digital object they discover. Our work is driven by the absence of a global approach to addressing this. No other systems meet the specific needs of a broad range of cultural heritage organisations, which has led to a proliferation of terms. This has led to confusion for the organisations and the users.
Providing standardised interoperable rights and reuse information
We provide simple and standardized terms - which we call ‘rights statements’ to summarize the copyright status of objects in their collection, as well as how those objects may be used.
The rights statements are designed to be used by cultural heritage institutions to communicate the copyright and re-use status of digital objects to their users. These statements provide a best practice for use by both international, national and regional aggregators of cultural heritage data, and the individual institutions and organisations that contribute data to them.
The rights statements are not just about the making things easier for the user. RightsStatements.org establishes the vocabulary that every organization can use to talk to their audiences - internally and externally - about copyright and related rights in a meaningful way. It provides the technical and governance infrastructure to support their development and adoption, and ensure their ongoing relevance.
A collaborative approach to governance which ensures the consortium meets the needs of the cultural heritage sector
The rightsstatements.org consortium is currently hosted by Europeana and overseen by an interim Governance Committee.
Members of the interim Governance Committee:
- Emily Gore
- Greg Cram
- Maarten Zeinstra
- Melissas Levine
- Valentine Charles
Our Previous Work Plans
The first annual meeting of the Steering Committee was held in September 2017, at the offices of Europeana Foundation, The Hague, Netherlands. The minutes of that meeting are publicly available here.
The Consortium Steering Committee prepares annual work plans to structure its work and steps towards achieving its objectives:
With support from
RightsStatements.org has been previously supported by:
