I am very pleased to present a post and resource links on Creative Commons by my colleague Jason Baird Jackson. More and more cultural heritage professionals and students are faced with questions about how to best present original documents for public access and the proper citation and use of internet files. Jason provides a solid introduction and valuable links to Creative Commons licenses that are relevant today and will be increasingly important in the immediate future.

Creative Commons and Cultural Heritage

by Jason Baird Jackson

Do public archaeologists, heritage professionals, museum practitioners, and graduate students need to know about the Creative Commons? I think so. Robert Connolly does so as well, which is why he thought to ask me to contribute a short note to his blog. After you have learned a bit about it, I hope that you too will see the relevance of the tools provided by the Creative Commons to the work that you do. If you are already using Creative Commons licenses for your work in one of these fields, please consider leaving a note in the comments section telling us how and why.

The Creative Commons (CC) is a public interest organization that provides easy-to-use licensing tools that can help anyone who creates or communicates to specify more clearly the terms under which they wish for their work (writing, photography, almost anything we create) to circulate. When someone speaks of the Creative Commons, what is usually meant are Creative Commons licenses that the organization freely provides. There is more to the organization than its licenses, but the licenses are the focus in this short post. In a nutshell, CC licenses allow you to reserve some rights in your work rather than the full set of rights spelled out under national copyright regimes. As a maker of creative works, the licenses give you more flexibility in how you want to share the things you have made.

The best way to learn about CC licenses is to visit the organization’s website and to watch a few of the explanatory videos that the organization has created.

I am not an expert on the Creative Commons in general and I am not affiliated with the organization (except as an occasional donor), but I have tried to speak helpfully of the Creative Commons in the context of work by public folklorists and of the kinds of local communities with whom they often work. “Why the Creative Commons with Folklorist Jason Baird Jackson” was episode 22 of the Artisan Ancestors podcast hosted by my Indiana University colleague Jon Kay.

Jon is the Director of Traditional Arts Indiana (TAI) and TAI has organized a series of informative webinars, one of which I did on “Using the Creative Commons.”

One place where I use CC licenses to advance museum anthropology is in Museum Anthropology Review, the journal that I edit. For most of its history, MAR content was published under the Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license (by-nc-sa 3.0). Reflecting an upgrading of the license set, we now use a 4.0 license. Reflecting growing consensus among open access journal publishers, we now default to the more liberal attribution-only (by) license. Authors can request a different license, but this is now the journal’s default.

Compare these two licenses here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In closing I want to point to a few more related tools that might prove useful to readers of this blog.

If a work is in the public domain, it is possible to signal this with resources comparable to the CC licenses. It is also possible for a creator of a new work to unambiguously dedicate her or his work to the public domain, thereby asserting no author’s rights in it. These two sets of tools are described here.

Those working in, or in partnership with, local or indigenous communities with special cultural property concerns, should be aware of the Traditional Knowledge licenses and labels being developed by the organization Local Contexts. This is a great effort designed to address important and related, but different needs from those addressed by the Creative Commons. The Local Contexts website and associated videos and documentation do a great job of introducing these tools and the contexts that motivate them. I expect that museums and other organizations stewarding cultural heritage materials will be using these TK licenses and labels more and more in the years ahead.

Thanks to Robert for this chance to share a bit of information about licensing and labels for heritage folks.

Jason Baird Jackson is Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and an Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and can be reached at jbj(a)indiana.edu and visit his blog Shreds and Patches.