Copyright and Rights Management - provides advice about the main legal issues you are likely to encounter when creating and using digital resources. The reason that copyright and rights management issues are so intrinsic to this process is that if you translate something which already exists, be it a photograph, text, or work of art, into a digital format you are making a copy of it and therefore potentially breaching copyright. Some of the chapters in this Guide therefore concentrate explicitly on the best way to go about creating, managing and preserving digital images. Over the years standards have emerged to help us logically group together pieces of information which we wish to use to describe works of art and to apply them consistently. These are supplemented by terminology standards and controlled vocabularies, such as the Union List of Artists Names and the Art and Architecture Thesaurus , which have a wide applicability within the visual arts and whose use can greatly enhance the usability and accessibility of the digital resources.
Bad documentation can easily invalidate a good set of images which have been digitised with care.
It will be argued that the planning for this stage should happen as soon as possible in the life cycle of your resource creation project. Any kind of loss of precious digital information is frustrating and is best avoided. This chapter gives advice on how to select and maintain sensible storage means for your digital resources. It also gives an introduction to digital preservation, which is a rapidly developing area. Since information stored in digital format has proliferated in a way we could never have predicted fifteen years ago, its long-term preservation and how to safeguard it against obsolescence and decay is fast becoming a global problem.