The British Library is an invaluable resource for the nation, providing unparalleled access to a vast collection of artefacts. To meet the needs of its users, while adhering to regulatory and digital licensing restrictions, the library requires an efficient search, discovery, and access experience.
However, due to the variety and increasing complexity of the digital rights that each item in the library's collection has, equally sophisticated digital rights management software is required. As the library collection continues to grow, it is essential to keep evolving tools and infrastructure to maintain quality and pace.
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 WoodThe British Library has a vast collection of digital artifacts that require accurate management of rights to ensure compliance with legal requirements and maintain accessibility to users. The library's collection is constantly growing, and its XML based artifact catalogues are optimized for specific media types, requiring complex XSLT and tools to update efficiently.
The NewRedo team designed and built a web-based Rights Management system that allowed staff to inspect individual records and transformed making bulk changes in response to ownership transfers.
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.
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