What are the Copyright Management guidelines?
The Copyright Management Guidelines aim to support best practice in copyright management in cultural heritage organisations by highlighting steps to take towards a harmonised approach. They focus on establishing workflows to deal with copyright in collection management, providing sufficient copyright support or knowledge and integrating copyright needs in activities and projects.
The guidelines are structured around a simple matrix, which highlights the steps to take and breaks each step down to identify the resources you will need, the colleagues you will need to involve, and more.
Why were they created?
Maintaining a harmonised approach to copyright management within a cultural heritage organisation is pivotal to fostering copyright best practice. It is also key to making the most of opportunities to develop organisational strategies and promote safe, open, and equitable content access, preservation, and re-use. These guidelines - which are free to use and download, and published under a CC BY licence - are available for all to use to work towards this goal.
Who are they for?
The guidelines are designed to aid anyone who works in a cultural heritage organisation and wants to help their institutions to develop robust and harmonised approaches to copyright management. These guidelines can be your aid in project planning, in strategy and team planning and in internal advocacy.
Who created them?
The guidelines were created by the Europeana Copyright Community Steering Group. After the development of a first draft, they were shared with the Copyright Community for comments and feedback. The first draft was refined taking those into consideration. The guidelines were designed by Studio Rrook.
How can you access them?
The guidelines are available to download as a PDF - find out more and download them here.
Join the launch event
The Copyright Community will be officially launching the guidelines at an online event on 8 June! We will introduce the guidelines, outline the steps in the document, and highlight how this resource can support you and cultural heritage more widely. Sign up now!