[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Use of "rights statements" module?

Fri Jul 24 10:21:36 EDT 2015

Hello Max and all!
Our use cases here at the Rockefeller Archive Center align pretty nicely with the Bentley's: we want to have machine-actionable statements that allow us to restrict access to digital objects based on donor agreement restrictions, copyright, or personally identifiable information. Particularly important machine-actionable elements would be dates and actions that can or cannot be taken with those materials.

We want to be able to apply multiple rights statements to a single component or digital object in order to be able to completely describe all of the rights that apply to that component or object.

We’ve been creating PREMIS rights statements in Archivematica for all digital material we’ve ingested over the past couple of years, so we’re very much interested in directly transferring those rights statements to ArchivesSpace, which we see as our system of record for all collections management data, and where we’ll be managing those rights going forward.

Evelyn McLellan of Artefactual has pulled together a very detailed mapping of PREMIS rights statements, Archivematica’s implementation of PREMIS rights statements, and ArchivesSpace’s current model rights statements: https://wiki.archivematica.org/ArchivesSpace_integration#Archivematica_to_ArchivesSpace_Rights_records
As is pretty obvious, while there is some alignment, the mapping gets pretty messy at more granular levels, which is problematic from the perspective of machine-actionability as well as local practice variations. We’d prefer to see a much more direct mapping, with the ArchivesSpace rights statements being built out to be more fully PREMIS-compliant. It’s probably not necessary to control certain values in rights statements as tightly as Archivematica does, but as Evelyn pointed out, doing so does have some very nice benefits in terms of how these statements can then be acted on.

The one caveat to PREMIS rights statements is that they don’t map very neatly to the DACS concepts of Conditions Governing Use and Conditions Governing Access, since they are primarily modeled around the source of the restriction or grant (i.e. copyright, a donor agreement, etc) rather than the effect of the restriction or grant on the end user. There are ways of getting around this, but I think they require a controlled list of actions as well as restrictions, so you can define (at least locally) what those mean. This may not be clear (I am not yet fully caffeinated) so feel free to ask questions if this makes no sense.

Look forward to seeing how this conversation shapes up! This is something we’ve been interested in for a while now.

Hillel Arnold
Lead Digital Archivist
Rockefeller Archive Center

From: Max Eckard <eckardm at umich.edu<mailto:eckardm at umich.edu>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Monday, July 20, 2015 at 9:38 AM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Use of "rights statements" module?

Hello all,

Here's a recap of the conversation we had last week on rights statements and rights management in ArchivesSpace. In attendance were representatives from LYRASIS/ArchivesSpace, Artefactual/Archivematica, the Rockefeller Archive Center, Yale and ourselves (MLibrary and the Bentley Historical Library).

Note: Even if you weren't on the call, you are invited to share your thoughts on rights statements and rights management in ArchivesSpace on this list. These will later be converted to JIRA user stories by LYRASIS staff.

Topics of Discussion

After introducing ourselves and discussing our goals with regard to rights statements and rights management in ArchivesSpace, we discussed the following topics:

 *   the use of the PREMIS rights entity (or not) in archives;
 *   where best to capture and manage rights information in general;
 *   discrepancies between Archivematica's implementation of the PREMIS rights entity and ArchivesSpace's:
    *   Archivematica's is very granular, but is applied to the overall information package.
    *   Basic mapping exists between the two systems, but ArchivesSpace's rights statements and Rights Management module are not fully-developed or implemented.
 *   the machine-actionableness of human-readable rights statements (and, conversely, the human-readability of machine-actionable rights statements);
 *   Yale's Container Management plug-in, which gives users the ability to associate begin and end dates (or non-time-bound restrictions) with "conditions governing access" and "conditions governing use" statements; and
 *   the possibility of mapping PREMIS rights statements to conditions governing access and use statements.

Takeaways

 1.  We'd like both human-readable <userestrict> and <accessrestrict> statements, and machine-actionable PREMIS rights statements. That being said, we don't want to have to enter rights statements twice.
 2.  There will likely be a lot of different ways institutions implement and use rights statements, so they should be flexible.
 3.  It is important to use standardized language in rights statements.

Action Items

 1.  Artefactual will make a copy of some work they've done mapping PREMIS rights statements in Archivematica and ArchivesSpace available on their wiki.
 2.  LYRASIS will look into expanding rights statements and providing a fuller implementation of the Rights Management module in ArchivesSpace.
 3.  The Bentley will send out a recap to the ArchivesSpace Users Group. <-- check!
 4.  You (yes, you!), the ArchivesSpace Users Group, will reply to this e-mail and let us know what kind of uses you might have for machine-actionable rights statements in ArchivesSpace in order to help LYRASIS think through how they might implement Action Item #2.

To kick off the discussion, we at the Bentley might would like for ArchivesSpace (and our repository) to be able to reuse Archivematica's rights statements. We might use those rights statements to have our repository restrict access to a particular item or group of items until a particular date, based upon institutional policies regarding, for example, student and executive records. We may also use rights statements to restrict access to a particular subset of users (UM folks), or to a particular location (the reading room).

Thanks!
Max

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 7:04 PM, Michael Shallcross <shallcro at umich.edu<mailto:shallcro at umich.edu>> wrote:
Thanks for these points, Ben--this would definitely be a great thing to discuss at SAA!

Great point about the potential discrepancy between paper/analog and digital rights.  After some reflection, I'm wondering how much of an issue this might be?   We currently only use conditions governing access/use to record rights information for all our materials.  The additional functionality of the Yale container plug in helps provide some important additional information (esp. start/end dates and nature of the restriction) that I anticipate we would want to use for all materials (and I'm thinking about some future Aeon-ArchivesSpace integration as I type...).

While we're hoping that our grant project will yield the ability to automate the creation of PREMIS rights statements (in Archivematica and possibly passing these to ASpace), I don't know that we would have our processors use the rights module for paper/analog materials.  Also, these more extensive machine-actionable (PREMIS) rights statements would be most useful in a repository environment.

Just some random thoughts--as always, your point of view is much appreciated!  Take care and happy 4th--

Mike

--
Michael Shallcross, CA
Lead Archivist for Curation

[https://webapps.lsa.umich.edu/dean/lsa_emails/bentley-sig-em.png]
Bentley Historical Library
1150 Beal Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113
734.936.1344<tel:734.936.1344>
http://bentley.umich.edu/
http://archival-integration.blogspot.com/

On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 9:31 PM, Ben Goldman <bmg17 at psu.edu<mailto:bmg17 at psu.edu>> wrote:
Mike,

Admittedly, I haven't fully thought this through, but my immediate reaction is that your notion of locating rights statements in a repository might create a discrepancy between how we manage rights statements for digital materials and how we manage them for analog. My inclination would be to make the ASpace rights statements more PREMIS-compliant, as Hillel suggests, at least in order to make the potential cross-walking from Archivematica/PREMIS/repository/etc. a little less 'fancy'.

Incidentally, this is the kind of conversation I hope this community might have if/when it begins to consider integration with other software (at SAA on Saturday afternoon or beyond). A question I keep coming back to when thinking about digital workflows, particularly in relation to our emerging repository platform at Penn State, is which system should be considered the system of record for different types of metadata? I guess in this example, I'm thinking ASpace makes the most sense for rights statements, given the way we want our staff and researchers to use data in (and derived from) ASpace. But I'd love to hear more thoughts on this.

Finally, I wonder if DPLA's proposed interoperable rights statements might be relevant to any examination of the rights statements field in ASpace? Maybe? Maybe not?

-Ben

Ben Goldman
Digital Records Archivist
Penn State University Libraries

________________________________
From: "Hillel Arnold" <harnold at rockarch.org<mailto:harnold at rockarch.org>>
To: "Archivesspace Users Group" <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>

Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2015 5:12:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Use of "rights statements" module?

Hi Mike,
Your email is incredibly timely! We’re thinking about very similar things and I’d love to talk more in detail about your use cases and see where they might align with ours.
An additional approach we’ve discussed is more closely aligning Rights statements in AS with PREMIS, so that they’re PREMIS-compliant rather than PREMIS-ish.
I’d be happy to set up a call with you (and whoever else is interested) to talk through this a little more and see how we can coordinate!

Hillel Arnold
Lead Digital Archivist
Rockefeller Archive Center

From: Michael Shallcross <shallcro at umich.edu<mailto:shallcro at umich.edu>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 4:43 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Use of "rights statements" module?

Greetings, all; we've been exploring the rights statement module in ASpace as part of our ASpace-Archivematica grant project and had some questions.  A lot of questions, to be more precise...

Is anyone currently using (or planning to use) rights statements associated with archival objects and/or digital objects?

If yes to the above, would this be in conjunction with conditions governing access/use statements?

We've been exploring the wonderful world of the Yale container plugin; the ability to add start/end dates for restrictions and identify types of restrictions encompasses some of the basic features of the rights statements.

We've also been working with Artefactual Systems to explore how Archivematica PREMIS rights information maps to the ASpace rights statements.  It appears that the latter are 'PREMIS-like' but not really PREMIS compliant...  which has brought us to kick around the idea that PREMIS rights might be most appropriate to record in the Archivematica AIP METS (and passed along to a repository) instead of trying to do some fancy crosswalking into ASpace.

Any thoughts/ideas would be most gratefully appreciated.  Thanks!

Mike

--
Michael Shallcross, CA
Lead Archivist for Curation

[https://webapps.lsa.umich.edu/dean/lsa_emails/bentley-sig-em.png]
Bentley Historical Library
1150 Beal Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113
734.936.1344<tel:734.936.1344>
http://bentley.umich.edu/
http://archival-integration.blogspot.com/

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--
Max Eckard
Assistant Archivist for Digital Curation

[https://webapps.lsa.umich.edu/dean/lsa_emails/bentley-sig-em.png]
Bentley Historical Library
1150 Beal Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113
734/763-7518<tel:734.763.7518>
http://bentley.umich.edu/
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