In order to maintain complete alignment with the goals of a project, the administrative task of documenting where data comes from, how it is stored, and then made available for future use must be set down. This allows for universal assent regarding the methods for those involved, and allows third-parties to come and quickly gauge the results of a project based upon how accurately the data was wrangled and utilized.

For our project, because we are relying heavily on github there aren’t many hurdles to jump over. The question came up, however, of how we will be using the Case Book summaries from the publisher: InfoBase. There is pretty clear language on their website which doesn’t really point to being flexible.  “ “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.” 

It’s my belief that this kind of conservative sentiment is meant to deter any who seek commercial gain. Academic publishers are notoriously protective of their IP. I’m assuming that once I reach out to them about our use case that we will encounter no barriers in our academic purposes. We will be discussing this with Micki, however, who I believe has experience with historic documents and the kind of language best used for coming to an agreement with them. 

In the worst case scenario we will have to take the Cases and create our own descriptive language about them. This is not an impossibly difficult task to accomplish, but it would require a lot of extra time on our part. Our project is meant to be a straightforward scrapping of text with much of the work revolving around how to present on the webpage, if one or two of us needed to summarize the Cases in our own language it would put a hold on when we could start working on the webpage. Our case data is in the public domain, but the analysis from the Landmark cases textbook belongs to the publisher. It raises the question that perhaps we could retrieve summaries from another source? In this case we would need to reevaluate our metadata classification we have in place. Again, not an impossible task but we would need to restructure our data accordingly.