Joint study on copyright and related rights, on determination of the rights holders and, based on this, the legally secure digital provision of large-format, rights-protected teaching and research images

• Applicant: Dr. Frank Steinheimer
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Public Law
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 565049983

The Natural Science Collections (ZNS) of the MLU holds an assemblage of teaching charts comprising 2,950 objects (2,189 digitally recorded) with a focus on natural sciences, and the MLU's Central Custody (ZK) has around 800 large-format grave slab rubbings (all of which are digitally recorded). The FAU Collections and Museums refer to 2,630 teaching charts / educational boards (mainly zoology, physiology, botany, geography, of which 550 have now been roughly recorded; the FAU School History Collection has a further 2,000 school wall pictures). At the University of Göttingen (UGö), the Central Custody (ZK) lists at least 4,000 large-format teaching charts, primarily from the collections for botany (2,000+ published digital copies) and plant sciences as well as from zoology/livestock sciences. The charts/illustrations from the various partner institutions date from around 1870 to 1980. Almost a quarter of the illustrations were created by illustrators for the respective institutes and are therefore unique. The other, more extensive part of the illustrations comes from a number of well-known publishing houses and other commercial providers. A large proportion of the digital copies, including high-resolution object photos, are not freely available, sometimes not even for research purposes, due to concerns about copyright infringement. The user inquiries are diverse, from teaching or scientific projects in educational research, didactics, scientific and economic history to questions from history, art history, design, manufacturing or material and color research. The legal uncertainties are just as diverse with the rights to the original research, the first publication or the illustration template (scientist, book template, owner, etc.), the rights of the authors of the drawings (some of whom are still living), the rights of the commercial producers of the printed image (publishers), but also the new rights to the object photo of the image (commissioned photographer) and the copyrights of the metadata (universities). Using the selected holdings of large-format teaching and research images, the project aims to develop workflows for the digitization and web-based provision of objects (object data, object photos), the use of which is restricted by copyright or related property rights. The legal aspects of copyright are examined as well as the rights holders' requirements for a worldwide, free availability of the large-format research images (teaching boards and their publishers) determined and, accordingly, integrated into an infrastructural solution for the web-based provision of these research and teaching images. The developed protoype may then also work as a demonstrator for other institutions and different databasing systems. Tutorials are being developed for the technical implementation. A legal guide explains the copyright issues step by step and in a factual manner.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg; Lehrstuhl für für Bürgerliches Recht, Recht des ; geistigen Eigentums und Wettbewerbsrecht; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik; Koordinierungsstelle für wissenschaftliche; Universitätssammlungen in Deutschland; Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg; Stabsstelle Sammlungen und Museen; Verbundzentrale (VZG) des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (GBV); Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; Zentrale Kustodie; Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg; Zentrale Kustodie; Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg; Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen
• Co-Investigators: Udo Andraschke; Frank Dührkohp; Karsten Heck; Dr. Michael Markert; Dr. Michael Markert; Professor Dr. Dirk Schaal; Professor Dr. Malte Stieper; Martin Stricker