A System for Using National Bibliographies in Rights Information Infrastructures

In the process of digitising a book, a library needs to clear the rights associated with it. Rights clearance is largely a manual, time-consuming process which possibly costs more than the actual digitisation. To analyse the rights situation, a range of information is required, which is distributed across several national databases hosted in national libraries, publishers and collective rights organisations. National bibliographies are a key data source in these processes, as they are the only source to identify all the publications of a specific intellectual work in a country. However, national bibliographies are not designed and built to support rights clearance purposes. The information in bibliographic records results from cataloguing with users and library management in mind, and links between different publications of a single intellectual work are not available. This paper presents a system implemented in The European Library to integrate national bibliographies into the ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) rights information infrastructure. The system makes it possible to identify all different publications with a common underlying intellectual work. This system forms the main source of bibliographic metadata due to the fact that The European Library is an aggregator of all Europe’s national library catalogues.