The University of Michigan Library will be licensing all of it’s creative works under a creative commons license. They will be incorporating the license into their website and it will cover bibliographies, research guides, tutorials and lesson plans.
In the great library tradition of resource sharing, licensing content in this way makes good sense, and legitimises the ‘loan’ of useful content for adaptation and improvement that goes on anyway.
At Bond University, the library blog — The L Files – is published under a CC license, but no move has been made to similarly license other library content.
Are Australian libraries doing this already or moving in this direction? Let us know.
U of Michigan Library To Use Creative Commons Licenses — press release
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October 21, 2008 at 21:17
Interesting! How did you convince the powers that be that this is a good move?
October 22, 2008 at 07:44
It wasn’t very hard. Just asked the question. Library management was already aware of issues surrounding creative commons licensing.
October 22, 2008 at 18:06
The blogging project that I am piloting for Murdoch University contains a clause in its legal Terms and Conditions that all materials on the blogs are released under a particular Creative Commons license.
The blog template defaults to this license, but we have amended a plugin so people can change to a different Creative Commons license or to copyright at the click of a radio button.
I’ve explained it to people as “if it’s on the ‘net, others will take your content anyhow, so it is worth specifying exactly how you want them to re-use it”. So far none of the 50 or so blogs have changed their license.