Building an effective team is essential for delivering a successful product. Copyright workflows are complex, require specialized knowledge, and often cross organizational units. Here are some tips for building and managing your team.

Who Is Involved in the Rights-Review Workflow?

Digitizing and sharing archival materials online require expertise in both copyright and archival best practices. In the case of Emory Libraries, this resulted in a collaboration between special collections and scholarly communications professionals, but regardless of who is involved, practitioners need to be able to strategically select and evaluate collections of interest and scholarly value for digitization while also evaluating copyright and other legal issues. Scholarly communications and archives learning materials address copyright and digital collections respectively, but they rarely overlap. Scholarly communications practitioners can assess collections for legal risk, but they do not usually have training in archival collection management and processing best practices. Conversely, archivists can strategically select collections for digitization and evaluate the condition of materials, their provenance, and any donor-relations issues that may inhibit or advance digitization and distribution of materials, but they do not usually have deep copyright expertise. As a result, practitioners often collaborate with peers to distribute digital archival collections without a shared perspective or language, which can lead to errors, conflict, inconsistent assumptions, and duplicative work.

When putting together a team for rights-review work, you may be tempted to align responsibilities with individual actors, position titles, or slots on your org chart. Instead, it might be more helpful to focus on aligning responsibilities by competencies needed to perform a task. The benefit here is twofold: You can more evenly distribute work across multiple individuals when tasks are broadly distributed, and you can more easily scale the scope of work given the size of your staff.

In considering how to build your team, reflect first on the competencies needed to perform rights-review work. While not exhaustive, we have compiled a list of eight competencies:

• Metadata/cataloging. Libraries and archives produce digital collections to make those materials discoverable to a virtual audience. To do that, you need robust metadata (author, title, format, year of creation, etc.), which gives you the context needed to perform rights-review work. Metadata can also capture access decisions made about an object and allow for some automated processing in the future. Robust metadata may also let you quickly identify public domain material based on publication date or allow for automated rights assignment by license status. For example, let’s say you digitize an object and make it accessible with permission of the copyright owner. You can capture that decision in the metadata record, including the copyright owner, via a name authority record. In the future, you could run reports to assess if your institution has already secured permissions to make this work available based on the name authority record.
• Copyright expertise. When we talk about rights assessment for digitizing archival materials, we generally mean copyright assessment. In the United States, the copyright system was established by a federal statutory law that provides a set of exclusive rights to authors and creators for their original creations. Specifically, it protects “original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression” (see 17 U.S.C. § 102, Copyright Act, 1976b). The rights exclusively granted to creators or authors include the right to reproduce a work, the right to distribute it, the right to display it, the right to perform it, and the right to create a derivative work. These rights can be transferred to other parties either via legal contract or by the death of the work’s creator, and this protection lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years under the current law. The work that cultural heritage institutions undertake to preserve and provide access to materials in our care can involve exercising the exclusive rights protected by copyright. While copyright offers some legal exemptions to facilitate this work, cultural heritage institutions need to have sufficient competency in the law to employ those exemptions appropriately or to seek permissions from rightsholders when indicated. We created this resource assuming our readers have a basic understanding of copyright. For those requiring a primer on copyright and the ways it can impact this kind of work, we recommend the following resources:
  • Hirtle, P. B., Hudson, E., & Kenyon, A. T. (2009). Copyright and cultural institutions: Guidelines for digitization for U.S. libraries, archives, and museums. https://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142
  • Fisher, W. (2022). CopyrightX. https://pll.harvard.edu/course/copyrightx?delta=0
  • Gilliland, A., Macklin, L. A., and Smith, K. (n.d.). Copyright for Educators & Librarians [MOOC]. Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/learn/copyright-for-education

A strong understanding of copyright is imperative when conducting rights-review work. Staff doing rights-review work need to be able to accurately answer all of these questions:

• • Is the work protected by copyright?
  • If so, who is the copyright owner?
  • Is the work protected by a license or contract?
  • How do we get permission to do what we want to do with the work?
  • When is permission not needed to create and share a digital collection? (Macklin & Smith, 2014)
• Assessment of other legal issues. Building digital collections requires some understanding of other legal concerns. Rights of privacy, cultural heritage laws, contract law, and obscenity law are just a few. While you don’t need a full law degree to do this work, a basic understanding of how other areas of legal protection can limit building digital collections is important.
• Curation. Building digital collections generally requires making some decisions about what to include and what to omit. In some instances, you may build digital collections on a specific theme from multiple physical collection sources. In these situations, the art of curation is paramount. Supporting innovative and transformative research by building digital collections requires intentional decision-making about what to include or omit.
• Arrangement and description of physical collections. These activities add important information, context, and data to rights-review work. To understand the best approach to reviewing the rights status of a collection, you need a strong understanding of its provenance and organization. For more information, see Chapter 4: Processing with Rights in Mind.
• Project management. Rights-review work involves many interrelated steps. Having a strong understanding of administrative principles and project management oversight is needed to bring a rights-review project to fruition.
• Digitization. Transforming a physical object into a digital one that can be displayed online requires skills in digitization. It is important to understand how digitization can impact use of the materials. For example, decisions concerning resolution and image size made at the time of digitization can determine the usability of the object later on as well as impact the long-term financial cost of maintaining the digital collection.
• Management of repositories and digital collections. Once an item is digitized, it needs to be ingested into a digital collections platform. Ideally, this platform would include preservation capacity. To ingest and maintain a digital collection over time, you need skills and knowledge in repository building and management. Rights-review work involves understanding your digital collections infrastructure, including how descriptive rights metadata might be displayed to users and what rights-related information might be publicly available or stored in the backend.

These competencies can vary by institution. Some organizations may have one individual holding all competencies at varying degrees of depth, breadth, or experience. In other organizations, these competencies may be distributed across multiple teams, departments, or even libraries, and some may lack these competencies altogether. Identifying the people in your institution who possess these competencies and identifying any potential competency gaps will inform how you build your rights-review team. If you do have competency gaps, consider filling them by hiring consultants or obtaining training in these competencies for members of your project team.

While your immediate rights-review team is limited to those with the necessary competencies, rights-review work has a significant impact on other people in the library. At Emory, we call people impacted by rights-review work stakeholders. In constructing a team, be mindful of which stakeholders might be impacted so you can keep them informed of your work and how it may affect their experience or practice. A nonexhaustive list of potential stakeholders to inform might include the following:

• Donors
• Rightsholders
• Staff doing various digitization and ingest tasks and their supervisors
• Administrators at your cultural heritage institution
• Administrators at your institution’s parent organization (if it has one)
• Researchers, students, and/or public users

There are many strategies for identifying and informing stakeholders about this work. We recommend conducting a stakeholder analysis to help you determine who your stakeholders are and their relative interest in your work (Smith, 2000).

Building Your Team

Match Competencies to Organizational Goals

Once you know who in your organization holds the needed competencies, where there may be competency gaps, and who your stakeholders are, you can begin to assemble your team. The first order of business when convening any team is to understand the team’s purpose and clearly articulate the goals for the group. Is it a task force intended to deliver one specific set of deliverables? Is it a working group that will have ongoing responsibility to manage and oversee a particular organizational function? Is it a stakeholders group that will inform and advise on a project but not be engaged in the day-to-day work of the project? Each of these groups can be important in ensuring a project or program’s success, but they serve very different purposes, require different expertise, and have varying levels of engagement.

Once the goal and purpose of the team is clear, it is far easier to assess what kinds of expertise, authority, and ability are required to make a team successful. Assembling the right team for managing copyright and other legal risks associated with digitizing and disseminating special collections material entails combining individuals with the competencies identified earlier and those with institutional influence and authority. In some smaller organizations this may be a team of one, but in most organizations, especially larger and more complex ones, the team will include people from across different departments or functional units. Each team member should have a clear purpose for being part of the group. It can be tempting to include all potential stakeholders on a team, but keeping the core project team focused and employing other communication strategies to engage stakeholders will lead to more efficient and targeted work. The right team is like the Planeteers in the old cartoon Captain Planet — each person individually brings a unique skillset to the table, but it is when everyone’s skills, expertise, and positionality are combined that the team becomes more than the sum of its parts.

For our group at Emory, the core project team consisted of two members of our Scholarly Communications Office (the head of that unit and the copyright librarian) as well as two archivists (the head of collections processing and the associate director) from the Rose Library, our principal special collections library. Because our group included the functional leads for manuscript processing and for copyright analysis, we could therefore easily implement workflow changes in these areas. It also included administrators who had the ability to direct and approve policy changes and had direct lines of communication to higher level stakeholders and decision makers in the organization. Our task force was chartered by and received its charge from the director of the Rose Library and Emory Libraries’ associate dean for Research, Engagement, and Scholarly Communications. This project team ensured that key high-level decision makers in the organization were committed to our outcomes from the earliest phases of the project; that the core team had the authority and the functional knowledge to make policy and workflow decisions. Our team composition also ensured that in the course of our daily job responsibilities, we were communicating with stakeholders at every level of the organization and every phase of the workflow. Building a team primed for success will differ for varying organizational sizes and cultures, but keys to our success included the following:

• Our group was small enough to be nimble and effective.
• We had a clear charge with obvious buy-in from senior administrators.
• Our team members had the authority to make changes where they were needed.
• Finally, we had relationships or spheres of influence to introduce change into parts of established workflows that were owned or managed by people outside of the core team.

Identifying Your Stakeholders

Organizational Leaders

It is critically important to have buy-in and support from leaders in your organization when you undertake any project, but especially one that may have implications for individuals across different parts of an organization or that will require changes in organizational policy. The leaders you should be working with are not necessarily the people at the highest levels of your organization (though they could be!); they should be the people who have the right amount of traction and institutional clout to keep an initiative moving and whose support carries weight. Additionally, organizational leaders assume any institutional risks inherent to the project, so they need to be in full support of decisions around risk assessment.

Communication with leaders in the organization should start very early in the process. The leaders should be active partners in identifying project goals and crafting a charge and scope of work (for an example, see Appendix A) for the project team. Once the project’s team, goals, and scope of work are established, leaders will likely not have much direct involvement, but the project team should share regular status updates, inform their leaders of any major roadblocks (and request help in clearing them if necessary), and present these leaders with a final product, report, and/or set of deliverables at the end of the project.

Colleagues Directly Affected by the Project

At most organizations, the work that goes into selecting material for digitization, imaging the material, assigning metadata, building or maintaining digital repository infrastructure, ingesting digitized content into systems, and managing rights and risks associated with making digital collections available online is done by more than one person and often more than one organizational unit. Any changes to managing rights work could impact or change workflows for a number of people. If your project team is going to create workflows or policies that will impact other individuals or teams within your organization, those colleagues should be considered important stakeholders in the project, even if they will not be working on it directly.

We recommend sharing the goals of the project and the likely consequences for each person’s work with relevant colleagues very early in the process. This communication can be as formal or informal as is useful in your organization, but there is significant value in giving colleagues affected by the project ample time for the following:

• Sharing any ideas and expertise that may strengthen the project outcomes,
• Identifying barriers or roadblocks the core project team may not be aware of, and
• Adjusting to change and mentally preparing for new workflows.

It is very likely that the core project team will need to consult with these colleagues throughout the process to test and verify any potential changes. At the end of a project, this set of stakeholders also may need additional training on new workflows.

Colleagues Indirectly Affected by the Project

Even colleagues who are not directly impacted by changes in a digitization or rights workflow may have a stake in the process. It is almost always useful to share broadly that you are undertaking a new initiative and explain its goals and the anticipated timeline for implementation or completion. Informing a broad base of colleagues that a project is happening helps build organizational buy-in and a shared sense of purpose whereas hearing about a completed project after the fact may make someone feel blindsided, excluded, and undervalued. These colleagues likely only need a broad, general introduction to a project, potentially a midpoint milestone update, and a note upon its completion rather than ongoing engagement throughout the process.

Assembling a Successful Team

Following are a few questions to ask to build the right team:

• What is the goal of this project?
• What competencies do we need members of the team to have? Do we need each competency at each part of the process?
• Do we have people from the appropriate levels of organizational hierarchy involved?
• What, specifically, is each team member bringing to the team and how are they expected to contribute?
• Do the key people we really need to advance this project or program have the bandwidth to take it on in a way that will promote success?
• What competency gaps does the team have, and do we have a plan to address them?
• Who else needs to be on board with the project (even if they are not involved directly)?

In summary, three key kinds of stakeholders will need to buy into and support your team from a project’s inception: organizational leaders, colleagues directly affected by the project, and colleagues who are near to, but not directly impacted by, the work of the team. Each of these types of stakeholders require different types and levels of engagement, but it is important to engage and communicate with all of them.

Working Together

Establish Purpose and Ground Rules

Team-Building Strategies

Cross-functional teams are powerful because they have the potential to harness the expertise and experience of people with very different knowledge, training, and professional perspectives. This rich set of inputs can lead to extremely fruitful and creative problem-solving, but only if team members approach each other and their work with candor, respect, humility, genuine curiosity, and shared commitment to excellent results. Building an effective team requires pulling together the right people, but it also requires having a clear sense of purpose and a shared understanding of how you will approach the collaboration.

As noted above, a team contract or charter (see an example in Appendix A) is a useful tool to establish the norms, communication strategies, and other expectations for being part of a team. These agreements usually lay out the goals and values of the team, identify expectations for team communication (including frequency, communications tools or applications, and a documentation strategy for major decisions and deliverables), and identify the roles and responsibilities of team members. Team contracts help set shared expectations and foster each team member’s sense of responsibility, accountability, and trust.

Build Communication and Decision-Making Strategies

A key part of forming and functioning as a group is communication. Each individual in a group likely has preferred communication methods and styles, and different organizations have norms and requirements around communication that need to be observed. What do you need to consider when determining your communication plan for your team?

The group needs to come to a consensus on their communication style and preferences so that the team can develop a communication strategy that will be effective. How often does the team need to communicate? Do you prefer email, phone, messaging, or face-to-face interactions? Do you process information quickly or need time to absorb and reflect before you discuss a topic? These are all good questions to discuss with your team to make sure that group members agree on them. If three team members prefer to use a particular messaging application, and the fourth refuses to install or engage with that application, selecting it as your primary communication tool will alienate one group member and lead to knowledge and communication gaps.

Similarly, determine how decisions will be made, recorded, and communicated. Will you employ consensus-based decision-making or democratic decision-making? Who makes the final decision in the event of disagreement? All members must commit to the final decision whether their preference wins out or not.

There are several things to consider when setting up communication and decision-making strategies:

• Know your institution’s communication culture. While it is important that your team agree on a communication strategy for intergroup relations, you are likely working within a larger organizational context with requirements and norms of its own that need to be observed.
• What needs formal documentation? For our project in the Emory Libraries, we needed to formally charter our team and have the charter along with project scope approved by upper levels of library administration. We also had to deliver a formal report and set of predetermined deliverables to our project’s sponsors who shared them with library leadership. Every organization will have its own governance structure, approval processes, and norms for proposing projects, finalizing new processes, and documenting significant decisions. In some organizations these norms and processes are very formal, and in some they are not, but knowing how to advance a project and what documentation is required is key for any initiative to achieve buy-in from leadership and be successful.
• What can be shared more informally? While our group charter, final report, and deliverables were managed in a formal manner, most of our group’s communication both internally and with external stakeholders was managed more informally. We used our organization’s cloud-based collaborative workspace to manage our documentation, we regularly shared information with each other via email and Slack, and we met weekly to discuss progress, plan next steps, and perform synchronous collaborative work as needed. We shared our work with our supervisors and project sponsors in our regular standing meetings and provided updates about our work to various stakeholders at staff and project meetings. Even within an organization with fairly rigid governance structures, the majority of our communication happened in more informal channels or preexisting meetings because they were already established venues for information-sharing in our organization.

Build Empathy by Sharing Knowledge

Sharing Current Workflows for Each Person

Once a team is established, knows what it needs to accomplish, and has agreed on ground rules for how it will operate, the next step is for team members to develop a deeper understanding of each other’s work and how it impacts the work of the group. The fastest way for someone to feel unappreciated or invisible in an organization is for colleagues to not see or understand the contributions and skills that they bring to the table. In a cross-functional or cross-divisional team, basic misunderstandings or erroneous assumptions about current workflows in other areas can easily derail collaboration or lead to less than ideal project outcomes. In our example, one of the first things we did as a project team was conduct a mini “Processing 101” workshop in which the archivists on the team walked through what archival processing is, covered some of the basic principles and archival theory that inform archival processing work, provided an overview of terminology (e.g., heterogenous files), and discussed how archivists decide what gets foldered together and why. When team members have a solid understanding of how everyone on the team does their work and why they do it that way, it demonstrates respect for the labor and knowledge that have contributed to the existing workflows and helps to ensure that proposed workflow modifications are genuinely useful. It also helps avoid the trap of suggesting changes that may be economical for one particular process but aren’t aligned with the professional norms and best practices of a part of the field with which you are not familiar.

Training

Once you have identified and built your rights-review team, you also want to consider what additional training might be required. As we discussed before, rights-review work requires a number of different competencies. While expertise in each competency is not required for every team member, it is helpful for everyone to have a basic understanding of each for two reasons:

• It facilitates shared language, understanding, and empathy, which limits misunderstanding and miscommunication.
• It provides better insight into areas where conflicting views or practices might arise.

At Emory, we began our project by ensuring that all team members had an understanding of two areas essential to our work: copyright and archival processing. The team members without much copyright expertise completed Harvard’s CopyrightX online course in spring 2020. Also, as mentioned above, the two archivist team members provided a step-by-step training overview of archival processing best practices and institution-specific workflows for the other team members. Prioritizing training in this way not only ensured that all team members understood one another’s work well but also built trust among the team.

Conclusion

Developing a successful copyright workflow starts by building the appropriate team and setting them up for success. You can create your best team by first considering where all the competencies required for a rights review workflow might be in your organizational context. Then, determine how to fill any competency gaps, either internally or externally. Also consider your team in the context of the stakeholders you will report out to. Finally, set your team up for success by ensuring they engage in team-building exercises that establish trust and allow for productive information-sharing. A successful team will understand the work and practices of all team members who will be involved in the workflow. If that understanding is not in place at the beginning, start with information-sharing and training before moving onto developing your workflow.

Exercise: Building your team

Review the competencies described above and identify colleagues at your organization who have these competencies. Who has expertise and knowledge in these areas? Where are the gaps?

Plan how you might bring these competencies together: Are the people who have the expertise and knowledge available to participate, or do others need to acquire new competencies? Will you fill competency gaps by cross-training, or might you need to identify outside consultants?

Bring your team together and conduct a stakeholder analysis. Given your knowledge of institutional culture and history, work with your team to decide how best to engage with and inform your stakeholders for success.