Managing the rights for the British Library’s collection is fundamental to our operation, NewRedo delivered a Rights Editor solution within the timescales and budget that we needed
Kevan Wood
The British Library's vast collection of digital artefacts undergoes frequent changes in ownership and rights, affecting large portions of the library's collection on a regular basis. This can complicate the management of rights, especially when rights are held by multiple owners. Accurately maintaining rights is essential to the library's operations and ensures its resources are widely available while remaining compliant with legal requirements. Each artefact catalogue is optimised for specific media types, such as books, newspapers, academic papers, sound files and images, and modelled using complex data schemas. Updating these catalogues efficiently requires complex digital rights management software that is integrated into the library's inject pipeline, allowing staff to work quickly and maintain data consistency.
To understand the scope and nature of the problem, the NewRedo team held interviews and discovery workshops with technical experts from the library's architecture team and staff responsible for maintaining the collection. From this, the team designed and built a series of web-based management tools to fulfil numerous use cases and business challenges. The digital rights management software that emerged allowed staff to inspect individual records and parts of records in response to publisher queries, as well as perform bulk changes when wholesale rights ownership is transferred.
With the delivery of the new digital rights management software and tooling, staff could clear a backlog of catalogue changes that had built up over a considerable length of time. This also enabled the ingestion of certain types of media, like conference publications, at a rate that was previously impossible. The new digital rights management software has been immensely important to the library's operation, and the authors and publishers who contribute to this essential national resource.
We’re software development specialists boosting our client's business with bespoke systems. We’re practical, pragmatic and commercially minded, which means we do the right thing for you when it comes to building software.
New