ARROW Plus: consolidating the ARROW rights identification tool

Guest blog by Veraliah Bueno from ARROW Plus and The International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations.

Over the last 28 months, ARROW Plus, a Best Practice Network under the financial support of the European Commission’s Competiveness and Innovation Framework Programme, has been working on a number of developments that demonstrate a well consolidated - and enhanced - rights identification tool: the ARROW system.

ARROW Plus, a public-private partnership, brings together 33 representatives from all relevant parts of the book value chain from 17 European countries – libraries, publishers and booksellers' associations, ISBN agencies, reproduction rights organisations (RROs) and other collective management organisations, international organisations and technology developers. The project runs until late 2013.

Arrow Plus represents all aspects of the book value chain.

The achievements of this project include the enhancement of a system originally envisaged back in 2008, a legal entity, and most importantly, a tool to help libraries and others identify, in a streamlined and automated way, the rights, authors, publishers and rights statuses for in-copyright text and image-based works. The tool works by querying a network of data sources.

ARROW, the system developed by this inclusive partnership, is a completely customisable tool that has not only been piloted but is already in operation in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, with significant progress also being made in other European countries. It is also being used in a number of study cases and considered by important stakeholders for large-scale digitisation projects. ARROW is not limited to the European territory - it can be used anywhere. Find out more about who's using ARROW.

The expectations and results of the ARROW Plus project have been regularly referenced not only by the interested stakeholders, but also by politicians and experts all over the world. The results of the project have proven that the book industry is not only well-organised, but also willing to work out solutions for the current problems related to orphan works, out-of-commerce works and diligent search, and to help remove some of the obstacles for digitisation projects in order to improve cultural access and heritage policies.

Arrow Plus General Meeting

In early December 2013, ARROW Plus will hold its final conference. The event will give us the opportunity to demonstrate the developments of the last couple of years and also to look ahead to the system’s future. For more information on the project, go to the ARROW Plus website.