RightsRadar

RightsRadar is a web app (with optional mobile-friendly interface) that helps special collections staff and researchers determine what they can legally digitize, publish, or reuse. It centralizes rights metadata, donor restrictions, embargo dates, and jurisdiction-specific rules into a single workflow. Staff answer a guided questionnaire (work type, date, creator death date, publication status, donor terms), and the app produces a defensible rights assessment with citations, confidence level, and an audit trail. It also flags “high-risk” items, suggests next steps (seek permission, redact, restrict access), and generates standardized rights statements for catalogs and digital exhibits. This is an AI + traditional app: AI assists with extracting rights clues from finding aids, deed-of-gift PDFs, and catalog notes, but humans approve every decision. Brutal truth: libraries are drowning in rights ambiguity; they’ll pay only if you save staff time and reduce institutional risk.