This document discusses metadata rights statements from the perspective of speech act theory. It analyzes a sample of 488 unique rights statements from the Digital Public Library of America and codes them according to Searle's taxonomy of speech acts. The majority were coded as assertives (199) or directives (272) regarding copyright and usage permissions. Other speech acts identified include one commissive and one expressive statement. Non-speech acts (130) were also present. The analysis suggests rights statements communicate different types of speech acts and exploring how to automatically classify them could help improve metadata quality.

1. HOW
TO DO
THINGS
WITH
METADATA
From Rights Statements to Speech
Acts.
R. J. URBAN

4. Metadata Semantics
Knowledge Organization
• Colloquial
• Informal, document-like
representation structures.
• Metadata elements
conform to a complex set
of rules.
• Supports information
retrieval.
• Creates descriptions that
identify resources.
Knowledge
Representation
• Formal
• Grounded in formal
theories of First Order
Logic
• Metadata assertions are
true/false within an
interpretation.
• Available to support
formal reasoning.
• Relies on names to
identify resource.

5. Metadata Pragmatics?
• Semantics: what do words (signifiers, etc.)
mean?
– Colloquial MARC/XML semantics
– Formal semantics for knowledge
representation.
• Resource Description Language (RDF)
• Pragmatics: how does context contribute
to meaning?
– As humans we regularly interpret the meaning
of metadata successfully, even though it may
not be formally represented or machine
understandable.

6. So what?
Dublin Core Rights
Typically, rights information includes a
statement about various property rights
associated with the resource, including
intellectual property rights.

7. So what?
DC Terms class: rightsStatement
A statement about the intellectual property
rights (IPR) held in or over a Resource, a
legal document giving official permission to
do something with a resource, or a
statement about access rights.

8. DPLA Rights Statements

9. DPLA Rights Statements
87,000
unique values

10. Research Questions
• What are organizations trying to do with
rights statements?
• How are rights statements a kind of
speech act?

11. Europeana Context
“The [Task Force on Metadata Quality]
noted that many data providers
approach rights statements as an
afterthought and lack sufficient know-
how to apply the appropriate statement.
They therefore choose a restrictive
rights statement as a default.”
http://goo.gl/lHaeMX

12. Europeana Rights Statements
– Public Domain
– In Copyright
• Various Creative Commons Licenses
• Rights Reserved – Free Access
• Rights Reserved – Paid Access
– Orphan Works
– Unknown
– http://pro.europeana.eu/page/available-rights-statements

13. International Standardized
Rights Statements
• Europeana + Digital Public Library of
America (DPLA)
• http://rightsstatements.org/
• SKOS vocabulary representing 10 rights
statement classifications.

14. Problem

15. Metadata Quality Frameworks

18. Schlosser’s Memes
• Specific Ownership statements:
“copyright [organization]”
• Vague Ownership statements:
“copyright retained by the original owner”
• What you can/can’t do:
“we encourage fair use of copyrighted
material”
• Protecting Ourselves and You:
“no information on the rights in the collection,
researchers are responsible for determining
copyright.”
Schlosser, M. (2009). Unless otherwise indicated: A survey of
copyright statements on digital library collections. College &
Research Libraries, 70(4), 371–385.
http://doi.org/10.5860/crl.70.4.371

19. Speech Acts
J.L. Austin
• Maybe not all “statements” are
true/false
• Performatives
• Questions
• Commands
• Promises
• Oaths
• Declarations
• locutionary vs. illocutionary
meaning

20. Speech Acts
• Maybe not all “statements” are
true/false
• Performatives
• Questions
• Commands
• Promises
• Oaths
• Declarations
• locutionary vs. illocutionary
meaning

21. Searle’s Speech Act Theory
• Illocutionary force =
– Illocutionary point
(purpose of
statement) +
– Direction of fit
(relation of
utterance to the
world) +
– Speaker intention
(psychological
state)

22. Searle (1979) Speech Act
Taxonomy
Category Description Direction of fit
Assertive Utterances that commit the speaker
to the expressed truth proposition.
“The cat is on the mat.”
Words-to-world
Commisive Utterances that commit the speaker
to some future action.
“I shall faithfully uphold the office of
the president….”
World-to-words
Declarations Utterances that bring about some
change in the world.
“I now pronounce you man and
wife.”
World-to-words and
word-to-world
Directives Utterances that consist of an attempt
by the speaker to get the hearer to
do something. “Please pass the
salt.”
World-to-words
Expressives Expresses the speakers emotional or
psychological attitude towards a
No direction of fit.

23. Method: Sample
• 87,610 unique values found in aggregated
DPLA metadata as dc:rights.
– Frequency counts of associated records.
• Drop statements associated with fewer
than 100 records. (n=86,482)
– Of these, 78,191 only associated with one
record.
• Result: 1295 statements

24. Method: Cleanup
• http://openrefine.org
• Make all statements lowercase.
• Remove extra whitespace.
• Remove uniquing features:
– DOIs
– Copyright [date]
– Gift of/donated by [name]
– Cite as [citation string]
• Result: 488 statements

25. Method: statement analysis
• 488 statements
– Qualitative coding according to Searle’s
Taxonomy of Speech Acts.
• What is the proper unit of analysis?
– 603 coded excerpts. (these are not
necessarily sentences, especially for long
complex directives).

26. Assertives (n=199)
• Schlosser’s ownership statements.
• “all rights reserved”
• “copyright [copyright holder]”
• “copyright [date]”
• “This work is in the public domain”
• “No known copyright restrictions”
• “Purchased with Smithsonian Trust funds”

27. Directives (n=272)
• Schlossers What you can and can’t do and Protecting
ourselves and you.
• “contact the host institution for more information”
• “users may download the images for personal or
educational use - students may include images in
reports, for instance, and teachers may use the
images in the classroom - if the following credit line is
included with the image: courtesy of the georgia
archives.”
• “to purchase copies of images and/or for copyright
information, contact university of [x]”
• “this item may be subject to copyright”
• “this image available for use only with the expressed,
written consent of the [x] historical society “

28. Commissive (n=1)
• i hereby certify that, if appropriate, i have obtained and
attached hereto a written permission statement from the
owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included
in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, and specifically
allowing distribution as specified below. i certify that the
version i submitted is the same as that approved by my
advisory committee. i hereby grant to brigham young
university and its agents the non-exclusive license to archive
and make accessible, under the conditions specified below,
my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in
all forms of media, now or hereafter known. i retain all other
ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation, or
project report. i also retain the right to use in future works
(such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis,
dissertation, or project report.;

29. Expressives (n=1)
• the new york public library is interested in
learning more about items you've seen on
our websites or elsewhere online. if you
have any more information about an item
or its copyright status, we want to hear
from you.

30. Rights statement patterns
Assertive + directive.
Copyright [date], [organization].
For more information contact
x@x.edu

31. Non-Speech Acts (n=130)
• Unexpected discovery!
• “university of utah”
• person@ex.org
• "watt hall 4d, usc, los angeles, ca 90089-
0294”
• Are URLs speech acts?
– http://ex.org/rights.html

32. Non-speech acts in context
<http://ex.org/resource001>
<dc:rights> “University of Utah”
• Still not really a “statement”
• Not a legal document.
• Not a permission.

33. So what?
• Europeana Rights statements really about Assertives.
– Creative Commons Licenses (maybe more directive, but
still represented as an assertion that a license is available)
• Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)
https://www.w3.org/community/odrl/
– Policies
• Permissions
• Constraints
– Intended to be actionable by a system, so very tightly
defined.
– Mapping statements to ODRL may be difficult.
Permissions/constraints often mixed in rights statements
sentences.
– Not well supported in cultural heritage digital library
software.

34. Next steps
• Can text analysis help automatically
assign International Standard Rights
Metadata.
– Automatically recognize and separate
different kinds of speech acts.
– Determine relationship to rights statements.
• Fork Cohen’s Ciranda (detects speech
acts in emails)?

35. Parallel Research
• What do rights
statements refer to?
• Same data set.
• Tagged according to
indexical/referential
statements.
– This collection
– This (digital image)
– The work
– Etc. etc.