Enhancing access to 20th Century cultural heritage through Distributed Orphan Works clearance (EnDOW)

Describe the proposed research in simple terms in a way that could be publicised to a general audience [up to 4000 chars]. Note that this summary may be published on the AHRC's website in the event that a grant is awarded.
Digitization of 20th Century cultural heritage is severely restricted due to the real or potential subsistence of copyright and related rights. Under the new European laws on orphan works, a large amount of cultural heritage whose copyright status is uncertain could possibly be lawfully digitized by cultural institutions on condition that a "diligent search" of the rightholders has been performed. While these diligent searches trigger prohibitively high costs for institutional users, the project designs a cost effective de-centralized system that enables cultural institutions across Europe to source information from end-users and determine the copyright status of works contained in their collections. Ultimately, the project will allow for an enhanced access to 20th Century cultural heritage and will contribute to enable use and re-use of items that would otherwise remain scarcely known and certainly unexploited.
Key objectives of EnDOW are:
? To analyse the legal requirement of "diligent search" across the orphan works legislation of the 15 countries members of Heritage Plus
? To investigate best practices of orphan works clearance across cultural heritage sectors (libraries, archives and museums);
? (Based on this knowledge:) to design, implement and optimize an online platform for crowd-sourced diligent searching on works contained in the collections of European cultural institutions;
? To study the potential applications and challenges of the crowd-based search method for images, film and born-digital cultural heritage works.
Through analytical and empirical approaches to mass digitization, the project will foster knowledge exchange between cultural heritage stakeholders, including small and medium size institutions. It will produce a high-value tool to maximise sustainable management of recent cultural heritage and use and re-use of related cultural artefacts.

Since this project is mainly aimed at cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums), the expectation is that the public will deal with works that have a high probability of being orphans (for example old books, pictures and films). Users will therefore perform the costly right clearance exercise in place of the involved institutions, and take the relevant steps required by the competent jurisdictions (e.g., mostly contacting the relevant collecting societies) thus clearing the rights for a large amount of artworks, which will become available for use and reuse by the public at large.
The EnDOW platform, by allowing low-cost right clearance for potentially orphan works is an extremely high-value tool applicable in the short and medium term to maximise the sustainable management of our cultural heritage, by allowing the use and re-use of cultural artefacts.
The outputs of this project will impact on relevant stakeholders in a number of ways:
Working closely with institutions potentially involved in mass digitisation of cultural heritage (libraries, museums, archives) in several countries and delivering capacity-building events (conferences, workshops) will maximize the research outputs through knowledge transfer between researchers, institutions, policy-makers and the public.
The project will also target voluntaries and communities of artworks users and cultural heritage preservation NGOs, which will find in EnDOW a vehicle to fulfil their mission and to maximise their achievements.
Strongly promoting interaction among stakeholders (cultural heritage institutions, academic and no-profit institutions that manage online databases, collecting societies, and the public) will ultimately enhance the dissemination capacity of public institutions and hence public access to cultural heritage artefacts, which in turn will allow further transformative cultural production.
To policy-makers, the project will provide pioneeristic solutions to difficult and costly problems, which could later be implemented in other domains. It would serve as a model on the much-debated problem of centralised mass licensing which has hitherto absorbed large investments and it is recognised as a crucial engine for the knowledge economy.
To private stakeholders the project can offer an unprecedented testing environment for a new business model, which applies the power of crowd-sourcing to mass licensing of intellectual assets.
In conclusion, EnDOW will provide cultural institutions and private stakeholders with unprecedented tools to address the problem of mass digitization, and in particular of right clearance on large scale. This experience has the potential of being further expanded, ameliorated and employed by public and private stakeholders within and beyond the domain of cultural artefacts. This technology will be available on an experimental basis (beta version) at the end of the second year of the project, and it will be available to the public at large at the end of the project. It will be therefore usable in the short to medium term. The high value of this platform is self-explicative: it will substantially erode the costs of mass right clearance without any evident drawback.