Thing #5: Creative Commons

Oops, getting a little behind here due to pressures of work but thing #5 is Creative Commons, something I've heard a great deal about but never explored myself. The task this time was to explore the CC website and then choose a licence to apply to our blogs. I chose:


Anna McNally's 23 Things by Anna McNally is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at annamcnally.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://annamcnally.blogspot.com/.

Because if anyone's going to make money out of my blog (ha!), I'd rather it were me than you.

In term of archives, creative commons obviously has huge scope, particularly when looked at in conjunction with Flickr. A large number of archives have used the Creative Commons licence on Flickr [e.g.], which actually has a whole section of its website devoted to it. This is certainly something we could consider with older photographs from the University's archives, although we have to be wary of potential damage to institutional reputation when it comes to encouraging re-use of more recent images. Internally, this could also be a way of providing a bank of images for students to use in their work, to try to encourage more creative usage of the archives, especially by students at the Harrow campus.

I would certainly also argue for applying a creative commons licence to any user guides we publish to the web (which we certainly intend to once our catalogues appear online). There is inevitably going to be a great amount of scholarship going into them, in terms of researching the history of the institution and how it fits into the wider context of London and education provision. We all know that once something is online, you can't stop people copying it and pasting it elsewhere. My hope would be that by showing willing and adding a Creative Commons licence, you are encouraging attribution and citation.

Interesting, the Powerhouse museum have been using software to track what gets copied and pasted from their website and where it ends up. I think this is potentially really interesting as it would allow us to see what kind of geographical and subject-based reach we were having with the archives, but that's something for much further down the line.