[OAI-implementers] last-minute question about OAI-rights beta release

[Susanna Mornati]

Dear Carl (met in Bath and OAI3)
and Herbert and Michael and Simeon (unfortunately never met but hopefully 
some time!),

I have carefully read the document you produced as beta release of the 
implementation guidelines for conveying rights expressions about metadata 
in the OAI-PMH protocol:
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-rights.htm

Over one year ago, I had placed the same interest in the OAI-rights white 
paper:
http://www.openarchives.org/documents/OAIRightsWhitePaper.html

What follows may be the expression of my ignorance or misunderstanding, so 
please forgive me in advance if I write nonsense!

I was expecting that an extension of the protocol would be proposed to 
convey rights expressions also about the resources, not just about their 
descriptive metadata. In a document provided by RoMEO, RoMEO Studies 6: 
Rights metadata for open-archiving:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
at page 8 I read:
"Expressing rights over an individual resource via it's metadata may be 
done in two ways. All items in an OAI-compliant repository must, as a 
minimum, provide an unqualified Dublin Core metadata record for harvesting. 
One of the 15 Dublin Core elements is <dc:rights>. [...] Project RoMEO 
proposes that the rights metadata made available under the OAI-PMH is
machine readable. There are various ways this can be achieved. One way is 
to embed the rights metadata within the dc:rights element, another is to 
link to the rights metadata from within the <dc:rights> element. One way to 
implement the latter approach is to utilise a OAI GetRecord request within 
the dc:rights element. By passing a parameter such as 'oai-cc' in the 
metadataPrefix argument of the GetRecord request, actioning the request 
would result in a rights record for the resource being returned. The 
returned rights record should describe one of the 11 CC licence either in 
RDF/XML form or the  Romeo/ODRL form outlined earlier. This approach means 
that in addition to a DC record being available for each resource (eprint) 
an additional rights metadata record would also be available for each 
resource and this fact should be communicated in the data provider's 
response to the OAI-PMH ListMetadataFormats request."

Apart from the declared white-paper purpose (which I share) to deal with 
any expression, not limited to Creative Commons, my question is: was any 
proposal to convey rights about the resource via the protocol taken into 
consideration? If not, why? Is something of that kind being considered for 
the future?

Thank you very much for your patience reading so far, and thank you very 
much for the amount of beautiful work done on the protocol!!!

Best wishes,
Susanna


Dr. Susanna Mornati
Project  Leader AEPIC, www.aepic.it
Coordinator PLEIADI, www.openarchives.it/pleiadi
CILEA - Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT
Via R. Sanzio 4, I-20090 SEGRATE (MILANO) - ITALY
mobile +39 348 7090 226, office +39 02 2699 5322
mailto:mornati at cilea.it