At a recent RUBRIC meeting we discussed the idea that citation and
copyright details need to be **on the actual documents** in a
repository. Copyright statements in metadata don't mean much once the
document has been downloaded and is 'in the wild', lost amongst 3000
documents called stuff like `item_8593.pdf`, most likely.
How about an automated way of summarizing document metadata and the
relevant rights statement and adding it as a cover page to a PDF (or
HTML document) in a repository? That way the user will be able to see
what they've got when it's kicking around their hard disk. This should
be easy enough to automate. Maybe it would make a good ARROW
mini-project (strangely there's a [text
doc](http://www.arrow.edu.au/docs/files/ARROW_Mini-Projects_Scheme.txt)
about these grants) if a developer wants to take it on.
A related idea is to store document metadata in the XMP metadata stream
in a PDF. This was covered in what seems to be an unpublished paper
([Howison 2004](http://freelancepropaganda.com/archives/MP3vPDF.pdf))
which pointed out that an iTunes like approach to managing PDFs would be
very helpful. The [Zotero](http://www.zotero.org/)research application
should be able to do become iTunes for PDFs by recognizing and/or
embedding metadata into your research library but as far as I can tell
that's not yet a feature.