Resource Access

[Heidi Johnson]

Baden Hughes wrote:
> Currently I'm working on a repository which differential access controls
> applied to resources within the repository. After looking at the OLAC
> standards documents, the closest reference I can see to this is
> OLAC-Rights, which I can't find a draft for. However, based on the olac
> Metadata set, even the Rights element doesn't quite address this
> problem.
>
> Essentially we have a situation where for every resource there is a
> specified access control (open, enquire, closed) with some further
> refinements (open for reading, changes require permission, not for
> redistribution etc).
>
> Although we could create our own metadata extension to express this, I
> wonder if others have found other ways to address this, or if it is
> something new which we should add in some way to OLAC ?

The OLAC-Rights vocabulary is intended as a guide to the user seeking
some resource. It just provides a rough indication of how accessible a
given resource is, so they can decide if it suits their purpose before
pursuing it further.  We assumed that archives would have all sorts of
archive-specific controls and restrictions, and didn't try to cover all
the possibilities in the Rights vocabulary. For example, TalkBank has
9 levels of restriction, and as I understand it, AIATSIS has a more
complicated case-by-case evaluation process, governed by the copyrights
in the resource.

On the other hand, it's a very small vocabulary and could certainly be
expanded, if people think that would be more useful.

At AILLA, our security protocols require users to log in to our archive
in order to access ANY resource, so we can have an electronic record of
their having agreed to our conditions of use of archive resources. Users
can read metadata through OLAC or anywhere, but they have to come to
our interface to actually retrieve something.  Most of our stuff
will be free public access (Rights = standard), but we also have 3
different "levels" of restriction - really, three different protocols,
not tied to the intended use of the materials, but to who is the
designated permission-granter.  Any resource governed by any of those
protocols would simply be described as Rights = restricted, with a
short prose description of the nature of the restriction.

So the OLAC vocabulary works fine for us, since we just map our more
complex scheme on to the simple vocabulary.


--
Heidi Johnson, PhD.                                    ailla at ailla.org
Project Manager                                        www.ailla.org
The University of Texas at Austin
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Dept. of Anthropology, EPS 1.130
1 University Station C3200                             (512) 495-4604
Austin, Texas 78712-1086