Rights Expression Languages in Libraries : Development of an Application Profile

Abstract: The goal of the thesis is the development of an exemplary application profile for one institution guiding the use of Rights Expression Languages (REL) to include the rights information of digital documents in the metadata. Cultural heritage institutions face many challenges with regard to the growing number of digital documents. One challenge is the effective and efficient management, administration and presentation or publication of the documents according to their inherent rights. A basic issue is the inclusion of the rights information in the metadata file of the digital documents to enable automated administration of the documents. The application profile is supposed to show the REL’s potential for solving the challenge. Whether RELs can be applied practically in the cultural heritage sector is not in the scope of the thesis and must be examined in a large scale study. As applied research, the thesis does not follow a strict quantitative or qualitative research method but gathers, examines and evaluates data to develop an application profile. Due to the focus on technical issues, it aims at developers and not at end users. To reach the thesis’ goal, RELs are located in the area of digital rights. Four RELs are examined basi-cally by literature analysis. In addition, various representative licenses from one library are chosen which are “translated” into the most appro-priate REL. The findings flow into a prototype application profile which is evaluated in one iteration step by experts according to heuristic evaluation to identify technical and conceptual flaws. Based on the identified flaws, the prototype is revised. Finally, the exemplary application profile for the METS metadata schema is presented and recommendations for further elaborated appli-cation profiles are given.