A growing body of electronic content (e-content) is made available online by organisations in different sectors, both to their respective communities and to the general public. Such e-content covers a variety of areas ranging from health, education and museums to archives, research and public libraries. This trend of making available online and increasing access to e-content faces two significant challenges:

• The proliferation and diversification of content makes its identification and contextualisation increasingly difficult for the user
• e-Content initiatives are often fragmented and uncoordinated, thus significantly limiting the possibilities of realising the potential of online content for the citizen

The Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) aims to contribute to the resolution of these problems by:

• Facilitating the coordination and collaboration of a series of key public sector organisations
• Identifying and reducing barriers that inhibit access, sharing and reuse of publicly funded online material
• Maximising the value of e-content for the UK public sector organisations, content providers, specific communities, the general public and the individual user

The SCA is a 3-year initiative funded as part of JISC’s capital programme, which has as its key objective to create an environment where the access, sharing and reuse of publicly funded, online content is possible with the minimum frictions. SCA is sponsored by a series of key public sector organisations that support its vision. These sponsor organisations include:

• JISC
• British Library
• BBC
• Becta
• Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)
• NHS National Library for Health (NeLH)

Strategic Content Alliance sponsors manage a wide range of content of considerable variety and wealth. While there is an expressed desire and intention to make such content as widely available as possible, the conditions, implications and even nature of such access provision still remain to a great extent under-researched and not well understood.

The Strategic Content Alliance Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) consultancy is dedicated to identifying the optimal legal, technical and organisational structures that can lower barriers and allow its sponsors to take advantage of opportunities for effectively using internet technologies in the cultural, public, scientific and educational sectors. The SCA sponsors are particularly interested in the ways in which their core values may be served by introducing advanced services allowing the searching, sharing and repurposing of their content. SCA focuses on the exploration of the core conditions for providing such services and producing an environment where content may seamlessly flow between organisations. The main characteristic of such an environment is that content and services from all SCA sponsors may be freely shared and combined to serve their objectives.

The creation of such an environment is contingent upon the way in which rights, works and value flow from, through and in between the SCA sponsor organisations. Content should ideally be searchable across the various SCA sponsor organisations and any user should be able to share, combine or repurpose content seamlessly from all possible sources.

The SCA sponsors have already in place a series of services that perform one or more of the functions of searching, sharing and repurposing of e-content. However, the level of understanding of the way in which Intellectual Property (IP) and other types of rights influence the flows of content and the provision of such services is still relatively low. Furthermore, the ways in which flows of rights and content may contribute to the objective set by each project often are unclear.

The SCA is also working collaboratively with the BBC on a pilot project ‘BBC CenturyShare’, whose purpose is to promote interoperability across the public sector and from organisations represented by SCA sponsors, by gathering data from these organisations and displaying it.

Much of the misapprehension of the ways in which content and IPR could be managed to achieve the goals of public, cultural, educational and scientific organisations is directly attributable to the absence of good analytical devices for deconstructing the flows of value, content and rights within and between such organisations.

The aim of this report is to provide such an analytical framework and to illustrate the ways in which it may be applied in seven different cases representative of projects undertaken by SCA sponsor organisations.

The objectives are to provide:

• An interoperable blueprint for the flow of rights, value and content across the public sector organisations indicating points of tension and convergence
• Diagrammatic representations illustrating the current state of the flow of content, value and rights across the public sector, and the subsequent future opportunities that might be harnessed
• An indication of the critical channels where further development of IP tools by the SCA IPR Consultants is required
• An opportunity to capture the methodology used in this project, which can harnessed by other organisations across the public sector wishing to map their flows of content, rights and value
• An indication of any variants on this blueprint influenced by future aspirations (such as changing platforms of delivery etc), to ensure that the SCA can provide and plan for strategic direction relating to e-content access and use in the future