Step 2. Your contractual relationships
Objective
Do you know which suppliers you have existing contractual relationships with for the supply of bibliographic records? Do you know what sort of licence clauses may impose restrictions on your institution's activities?
This step will help you with this task.
Actions
Retrospectively understanding your existing contractual relationships can be hard, particularly when you do not have a legal background. Unfortunately there is no substitute for the task of pulling all of your contracts together, reading and analysing them. Try and enlist some legal support from within your institution to help you.
- List the suppliers that you have contractual agreements with. Typical institutions have contractual agreements with a wide range of suppliers.
- Highlight the clauses encountered in the licences with third parties that could restrict your activities - the example contractual clauses will help with this. Note that suppliers' glossaries are unlikely to be the same (so some "unpicking" will be required), and some licences may tell you what you can do rather than what you cannot do.
- Do any of your records contain UGC? Do you have the necessary consents to use and transfer this content (as well as ensuring that the content and records which are supplied do not breach any other legal issues,
Your task will be easier if the licences are in a machine-readable format (eg ONIX for Publications Licences).
Example
An institution may typically have contractual/licence agreements with suppliers such as:
- British Library
- Dawson Books
- OCLC
- RLUK
- Serials Solutions
- Talis