Rights Management Technology: What’s Happening Now (Part 2)

Rights Management Technology in Today’s Educational Publishing World: What’s happening now

This is the second of a 3-part series. For part 1, please click here.

Tracking Moving Parts

Throughout the lifecycle of a project, a Rights Professional must keep track of many moving parts, including schedules, budgets, image research and approvals, communication with stakeholders, negotiations and license reviews, updating rights data and ensuring accuracy, page reviews, acknowledgments, submitting invoices, and logging important paperwork. Many of these daily challenges can be easily addressed with an intuitive, well-designed Rights Management System such as DigiRMS, which streamlines complicated workflows and vastly decreases the potential for legal issues for all publishers. And with DigiRMS, clients only have access to their own projects, and user profiles can be set to control the level of access for each stakeholder.

In the current and the following article, we will look at some of these factors and how DigiRMS can address them.

Keeping Up-to-Date

Schedules continue to become more condensed, requiring teams to work together quickly and efficiently to meet deadlines that can seem daunting. A system that can not only track important due dates, but also incorporate a dashboard to remind project managers when those dates are approaching, ensures that projects stay on track. DigiRMS offers a MyTasks functionality to address this concern: Users can navigate to their dashboard upon sign-in to review upcoming due dates for reports, assessments, permissions, page reviews, and final files, as well as navigate directly to image assets or grants that they need to review and approve.

Budget Concerns

Budgets are an increasing concern, with publishers trying to clear rights for as little cost as possible. A key job function of a Rights Professional is expert negotiation skills, obtaining the broadest permission terms possible for the lowest fee. The DigiRMS platform gives you the ability to flag any potential high fees at the start of the permissions cycle, allowing publishers to make drop or replacement decisions earlier and not risk schedules. Throughout the licensing process, DigiRMS can track negotiation attempts as well as actual fees. The DigiRMS Budget Tracker tool generates a colorful graph of estimated versus actual costs, making it easy to control the budget as a project progresses, thus preventing overspending on assets before it is too late to drop or replace them.

A Lightbox Solution

Images are increasingly important in educational materials; especially for the visual learner, photos bring content to life! Typically, multiple stakeholders are involved in reviewing image research options including Content, Editorial, and Design teams, and often book authors themselves. These teams interact, providing feedback, requesting further research, and approving image options. Using email or meetings to review images can become tedious and time-consuming.

DigiRMS offers a Lightbox Solution that allows users to easily view options, communicate, and conduct research directly from the system using API technology with agencies such as Shutterstock, and all directly in the system (cutting down on those long email chains and additional meetings!). There are also multiple workflows for image approval, making it easy for all stakeholders to work in the way that best fits their process. Images can be highlighted for placement in pages before official approval. Low-res files can be housed in the asset record and quickly downloaded, and approved images can be licensed directly from the system. Metadata can also be used to track and search images, with data points such as image type, size, and color, as well as keywords for content descriptions, assisting the user to create a well-rounded image program.