The Copyrights Chain In The Digital Curation Process: "Which Copyrights" Project At The Nazarian Library, University Of Haifa

Open access, image sharing, and mostly the rise of AI emphasize the importance of providing clear licenses for the reuse of collections by memory institutes as a key step in the digital curation process. Trusting individuals to control their own data and its (re)use was an important concern since the early establishment of our digital collections in 1998 with unsatisfied solutions. This talk will describe our experience in a recent ongoing project to enrich the University of Haifa digital collections with clear copyright status, to benefit the user and owner’s experiences, inspired by WorldFAIR Recommendations Report for Cultural Heritage Image Sharing (Knazook and Murphy, 2023) We will explore “Which copyrights” project 2024-2025. Scope of 80,000 bibliographic records contains 200,000 digital representations covering local cultural heritage data. 50% have already processed and available with the copyright’s representation notice online. Our next step - Use a public platform to make the dataset available for the public. Sharing our collections, expand visibility and usage to a broader public, via non-academic platforms such as Wikipedia/Wikimedia. We hope our library experience will be useful to other institutions working with digital heritage collections, for the benefit not only of researchers but of the broader public as well.