Blockchain-Enabled Digital Rights Management and Resource Authentication in Smart Libraries: A Conceptual Framework for Digital Education Infrastructure

Smart libraries have become important components of digital education infrastructure because they connect learners, teachers, researchers, publishers, and institutional repositories through networked platforms and data-intensive services. Yet the same connectivity creates persistent challenges in digital rights management, resource authentication, licensing enforcement, user privacy, and trust. Centralized rights-management systems can be opaque, administratively costly, vulnerable to single points of failure, and difficult to audit across multiple providers and learning platforms. This conceptual study develops a blockchain-enabled framework for protecting digital rights and authenticating resources in smart libraries. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on smart libraries, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, decentralized identity, and digital education governance, the study maps major rights-management problems to blockchain design requirements and proposes a four-layer architecture: a user and stakeholder layer, an application and service layer, a blockchain governance layer, and an off-chain repository and metadata layer. The framework shows how smart contracts can automate licensing conditions, access control, usage limits, and compliance reporting, while cryptographic hashes and immutable audit trails can support resource authenticity and provenance verification. The analysis also highlights limitations concerning scalability, interoperability, legal enforceability, privacy regulation, cost, and staff readiness. The article contributes to Global Education Insights by reframing smart libraries as trust infrastructures for digital learning ecosystems and by offering a practical implementation roadmap for institutions seeking secure, transparent, and accountable management of educational digital resources.