Policy route map for academic libraries’ digital content

Abstract

This paper presents a policy decision tree for digital information management in academic libraries. The decision tree is a policy guide, which offers alternative access and reproduction policy solutions according to the prevailing circumstances (for example acquisition method, copyright ownership). It refers to the digital information life cycle, focusing mostly on its creation (digitized or born-digital), acquisition, copyright and availability. The resulting decision tree is based on a policy model, which was initially divided into two branches – one for digitized and one for born-digital information. The decision tree simplifies and unifies commonly adopted rules which were identified through a questionnaire survey on the access and reproduction policies of 67 digital collections in 34 multidisciplinary libraries (national, academic, public, special, etc.) from 13 countries. The results of the decision tree are used to propose alternative policies.