Digital Rights Management: A Librarian's Guide to Technology and Practice

Citation

Calvert, P. (2009), "Digital Rights Management: A Librarian's Guide to Technology and Practice", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 5, pp. 880-881. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910998623

The increasing importance to information managers of technological devices and content in technological formats has made an understanding of digital rights management (DRM) a requirement for all who wish to work in the IM professions. This is not the first book in the field, with perhaps Joan Van Tassel's Digital Rights Management (Focal, 2006) the best previous publication, but this book is aimed directly at librarians and thereby fills a hole in the market.

The definition of DRM used here is the digital management of rights pertaining to the access and use of digital materials, which is narrower and more helpful than some other definitions used elsewhere. The book is built around a core DRM model consisting of the resource, the rights owner and the user tied together by usage rights and what the author calls a “use event”. The model is robust and helps readers not familiar with some of the concepts see how each fits together.

Early chapters deal with copyright and other rights such as moral and privacy rights. The content is full of useful examples and good descriptions of the law in several English speaking countries. The author suggests that libraries and archives develop and write a copyright policy that will cover issues such as how to track down the owners of material in copyright, what to do with the organisation's own intellectual property, and which individuals will deal with questions and problems in copyright matters.

The next two chapters deal with the resource and with the user. They offer ideas on the precise identification of a resource, which has two aspects, the definition of the resource and its identifier; and on the authenticity of the resource. Then the user or “agent” is dealt with in some detail, and the author lists many questions that the user should ask before selecting a resource.

The sixth chapter is one that librarians should be reasonably comfortable with as it deals with DRM metadata. This requires getting used to many new concepts necessary for the proper and full DRM description, such as rights description, rights licensing, and rights workflow, all of which are described in sufficient detail here. There are currently several guides, standards and models for describing rights metadata and the author leads the reader through many of the most widely used, such as the California Digital Library copyrightMD schema, the RUCore Rights schema, METSRights, MPEG‐21, ONIX, and so on. This is a thorough and hugely useful chapter.

The seventh chapter is on DRM technologies. Librarians and archivists seem to be united in believing that DRM technologies are a nuisance that should be opposed, so the author has asked if that is really how it must be. Agnew first describes encryption, watermarks, digital watermarks and signatures, and other common DRM tools, and then introduces some lesser known and some emerging technologies. Her answer to the question, though not given directly, is that some of the new and more flexible DRM architectures give librarians and archivist more room for manoeuvre than before. Until it is easier to live with DRM then for now the best strategy is awareness. That awareness is something this book ought to increase.

Her final chapter is a good conclusion because it puts the pieces together. I am sure that many information managers will avoid this book because they find its subject unpleasant and incomprehensible. This book, with its clear writing and willingness to engage with difficult technologies and complex issues, could really begin the process of changing some minds about DRM. It is highly recommended.