The Right Stuff: open access at the National Library of Scotland
The development of open access in Scotland continues to encounter barriers, despite significant progress having been made at the National Library of Scotland in providing open access to digitised and born-digital collections, as well as descriptive metadata. This presentation will give an overview of the Library and its licensing framework and then discuss some of the issues. The Library has ongoing mass digitisation projects but a question it is increasingly asking is where is the evidence that the “right stuff” has been selected for a wide and diverse audience? There is the legal conundrum of the last letter of Mary, Queen of Scots, written in 1587, not being in the public domain. Separately there is the unintended impact on open access publications and websites of UK legal deposit regulation which prioritises the interests of copyright holders. Commercial enterprises applying restrictive licenses or embargos on digitised public domain resources; the “rights stuff”. This has consequences for the use of out-of-copyright materials in research and in improving equality and diversity of access to national collections.