Copyright Assessment in the Trenches: Workflow, Tools, Metadata, and More

Assessing copyright varies from institution to institution along with the specific workflow and end-user notices. This article looks at tools used in art libraries in a range of contexts along with pragmatic perspectives on copyright evaluation from a museum art library, a public research library, a university copyright advisory office, and a public university. Pain points for determining copyright presented by various formats, ownership issues, and digitization are addressed through cases encountered by the authors. Helpful tools and workflow strategies for moving forward, including widely available charts and resources, as well as software for copyright determination, are shared. Finally, the authors describe how different institutions are handling rights metadata. [This article is an expansion of a panel presentation given at the ARLIS/NA conference held in New York, New York, in February 2018.]