EnDOW Community. Public engagement in orphan works clearance to unlock access to UK film archives

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EnDOW Community is a follow-on project designed to increase public engagement around EnDOW ("Enhancing access to 20th Century cultural heritage through Distributed Orphan Works Clearance"), a 3-years collaborative project funded by AHRC under the Joint Programme Initiative in Cultural Heritage and Global Change (2014-2018). The underpinning EnDOW project has developed an online resource--the Diligent Search Tool (available at http://diligentsearch.eu)--that helps libraries, museums and archives in the complex task of clearing rights in their 'orphan works'. These are works in which copyright still subsists but whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be located. In order to lawfully digitize and make such material available to the public, the holding institutions must prove they have carried out an unsuccessful 'diligent search' of the copyright owners. While this requirement frequently results in a burdensome process, for which many cultural institutions lack resources and expertise, the EnDOW Diligent Search Tool facilitates this task and makes it feasible also to users with no specialized knowledge of copyright law.Building on the resource created by the underpinning research project, EnDOW Community explores an innovative way of using the EnDOW Diligent Search Tool. This online resource will be used as a crowd-sourcing platform for copyright clearance in the UK film archive sector. In collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI), this follow-on project will engage a community of volunteers in the task of clearing rights on a large amounts of films and audio-visual works that are potentially orphan works within BFI and other national and regional film archives. This is an untapped and potentially immense wealth of material that may become available to the public as diligent search is systematically carried out on it.To achieve its goal, EnDOW Community will create a community of volunteers with the skills to clear the rights of audio-visual copyright works by engaging identified cultural institutions (national and regional film archives) to use the online Diligent Search Tool. A dedicated recruitment campaign will be launched across the main UK film festivals and events. Online resources will be activated to assist the volunteers with the performance of diligent searches on a number of titles selected by BFI and the national and regional film archives, including video tutorials, webcasts and discussion forum. As a result of such engagement, the project will deliver a collection of about 300 right-cleared orphan works (films) that the hosting cultural institutions will be able to lawfully exploit and share online. The engagement and expertise generated by this one-year project has the potential to be extended to a wider range of archival material, so that cultural heritage institutions across all sectors can make the most of existing legislation on orphan works and cultural preservation.