ARROW: Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana

The European Union promotes programs of "mass digitization" in order to make the cultural and scientific resources in Europe accessible to all, and to preserve them for future generations. The Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana (ARROW) project began in September 2008 with the aim of facilitating the management of rights in digitization projects. Partial funding was provided by the European Commission under the programme "ICT Policy Support". The outcome of the project was an automated system for distributed management of rights information that meets the needs of digital libraries and is easily adaptable to other contexts of use. With the approval of the "ARROW Plus" project in April 2011, the system will be further improved, extending the number of covered countries, and integrating rights information about images contained in books.