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Digital Acquisitions
Services
Issues in the Acquisition
of Digital Information
Appropriate
Licensing Provisions and Standards
What else can we do?
The advent of electronic publishing raises
a host of new issues with which libraries must contend. The
rise of information licensing, a volatile economic marketplace,
technical considerations, and long-term preservation of the
intellectual record (a.k.a. "the archiving problem") are just
a few of the areas that pose major challenges to our budgets,
our workflow, and our service and collection management infrastructure.
The goal of the Digital Acquisitions program is to foster
the development of a suitable university-wide infrastructure
of policies, methods and procedures for licensing, acquiring
and managing these resources.
Policies and practices governing campuswide
licensing of electronic resources are developed in association
with the Digital
Acquisitions Committee of the University Library Council.
The Committee's web page provides access to meeting minutes
and other relevant documents in addition to the materials
found here.
Current
Digital Acquisitions Services include:
-
Licensing standards and negotiation.
The E-Resource Licensing Specialist negotiates licenses for shared resources and
advises individual libraries on licensing issues. The
Harvard University Library Guidelines for Licensing Electronic
Resources (restricted to the Harvard community) offer
guidance to Harvard librarians and examples of specific
contract language to include in information licenses.
Licensing instructions for vendors are also available
for distribution.
- Digital
Acquisitons web page (DigAcq Web).
Digital acquisitions information is posted
to a central web page accessible to all Harvard librarians.
The information available includes resources under consideration
and on trial, usage statistics, a calendar of events, and
related information.
- Resource
evaluation and stewardship.
In association with the Committee
on Electronic Reference Services (COERS), proposed new resources
undergo a thorough formal evaluation. Stewards are assigned
to existing resources to monitor use, identify problems
and needed improvements, and assess their value on an ongoing
basis. See the report Evaluating
and Monitoring HOLLIS Plus Resources (January 1999)
for more information. Evaluations and stewardship information
are posted to the DigAcq Web Stewardship Toolbox for general review.
- Financial
services.
An annual budget is prepared for shared purchases,
with costs allocated on the basis of HOLLIS Plus usage statistics.
Shared resources are paid out of a central fund and charged-back
to libraries on a quarterly basis.
ISSUES
IN THE ACQUISITION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION
Overviews of key issues for the
Harvard community will be published here. The first of these
addresses intellectual property.
Information
Licensing, Intellectual Property, and Copyright
The inherently dynamic and transitive nature
of digital information--that is, the ease with which it can
be downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, and altered--and an
expanding information economy that accords high economic value
to information products, have led to a major shift in intellectual
property policy at the national and international level and
the emergence of licensing as the primary vehicle for controlling
intellectual property rights in the digital age. Licensing
is fast becoming a dominant paradigm even in tangible domains
such as agribusiness; where, for example, farmers now sign
contracts that prevent them from propagating genetically-engineered
seeds, tying their fortunes to those of large agricultural
biotech firms. Whoever owns intellectual property today has
more 'license' than ever to control how that property may
be used.
Recent legislative initiatives exemplify this
trend:
The
Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) of
1998 endorsed the development of 'technological protection
measures' which will allow copyright owners to enforce restrictions
on use through sophisticated technological means; the technological
equivalent of a chastity belt for electronic information.
DMCA was enacted to implement the
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) copyright
treaty (1996) which addresses copyright implications of information
technology at the international level.
Pending database protection legislation threatens to grant compilers of databases unprecedented control over the downstream uses of factual information.
The
Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA)
new model legislation that may soon be enacted by the states,
will, if adopted, legitimize mass market "click-on" licenses
to facilitate electronic commerce over the Internet. Prior
to UCITA, the status of click-on agreements in the courts
has been equivocal.
These developments have shattered our reliance
on copyright law, including its broadly-defined principles
of fair use, to govern the permissible use of library materials.
We now must educate ourselves about what is for many of us
an entirely new body of state law governing contractual agreements.
It's important to know that contracts generally supersede
copyright when the two are in conflict. As a consequence,
information licenses must be carefully negotiated to define
appropriate uses of digital information within the academic
context and preserve the fair use protections available under
copyright.
Appropriate
Licensing Provisions and Standards
What constitutes appropriate
use of electronic information? How should entities such as
'authorized users' and 'site' be defined in a given environment?
In other words, who is eligible to use this information, where,
and for what purpose? What other rights and obligations should
attend this new form of business relationship to ensure fairness,
reliability and accountability? Beyond the general framework
of contract law, there are few legal standards here to guide
us. Various organizations and constituencies within the library
and publishing community have, however, developed principles
for information licenses and even drafted model licenses.
Many of these can be found at the Liblicense
site maintained at Yale. The Model License developed by
NESLI (National
Electronic Site Licence Initiative) in the U.K. is a particularly
useful example. But while models and principles help to shape
the discussion, the real norms of licensing are defined by
our actions in the marketplace, whenever we place our signature
on a license. It's critical that we negotiate these licenses
proactively to secure broad rights of information use for
educational and research purposes. The Harvard University
Library Guidelines for Licensing Electronic Resources (link
will be on ldi site) offer guidance to Harvard librarians
and examples of specific contract language to include in information
licenses.
What
else can we do?
Our actions on two other fronts
can help to restore balance in the area of intellectual property:
- Intellectual property policy advocacy
at the state, national and international level, to ensure
that relevant legislation provides adequate safeguards for
the research and education community. Database protection
at the federal level and contract law at the state level
are two areas which urgently require our attention.
- Copyright retention initiatives
that will return control of intellectual property originating
within the academic community to its rightful owners, reducing
our economic reliance on commercial publishers to whom academic
copyrights are now routinely transferred. The question of
who should own academic copyright has no single (or simple)
answer; but given the escalating costs for scholarly information,
the imperative to seek new structures in which the academy
and its members can exercise greater control over the dissemination
of scholarship is clear. Organizations providing leadership
in this area include the ARL Office for Scholarly Communication
including its Scholarly
Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
of which Harvard is a founding member, and the Association
of American Universities among others. Our participation
in such initiatives is critical, as is an ongoing effort
to educate our own faculty about the interaction between
copyright and the cost of scholarly information.
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