Share the wealth: Creative Commons licenses for library learning objects

Abstract

Katie Fortney, Cody Hennesy, and Deborah Murphy Share the wealth Creative Commons licenses for library learning objects E fficiency, openness, sharing, and value: these are the bywords driving higher education today, as evidenced by academia’s increasing focus on online instruction meth- ods ranging from course management sites to MOOCs. Academic libraries are no excep- tion, and we continue to face new questions about how we can make our online instruc- tional tools more useful and accessible. To that end, the University of California (UC) Libraries Heads of Public Services (HOPS) recently charged a taskforce to establish recommendations for assigning clear reuse permissions to UC Libraries’ learning ob- jects; specifically, should the libraries adopt Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and if so, which one(s)? In order to make informed recom- mendations, the HOPS taskforce compiled information on: • the types of works that would be considered learning objects, and therefore covered by this recommendation, and what their chief purposes were; • what practices UC libraries and peer institutions had adopted around reuse poli- cies for similar objects; and • what options—specifically, which CC license terms—were available and what were the implications of their implementa- tion at individual libraries and UC-wide. Library learning objects Library learning objects potentially encom- passes a broad range of works. For our C&RL News July/August 2014 purposes, we considered the term to include any work published online by a library. 1 Examples might include tutorials, text from a LibGuide, or a page on how to write an annotated bibliography. Creators of these works often look at examples from other libraries before and during the writing of their own materials, and sometimes adapt them for reuse at their own institution. Creative Commons license considerations Creative Commons 2 is a global nonprofit organization that provides a set of standard licenses to enable and enhance sharing and reuse of creative works. 3 Users choosing a CC license can select from these terms: • Attribution (BY): You let others copy, distribute, and display your copyrighted work, but only if they give you appropriate credit. All Creative Commons licenses have this requirement, which does not exist in- dependently in US copyright law. • Noncommercial (NC): You let others copy, distribute, and display (and possibly adapt) your work but for noncommercial purposes only. Katie Fortney is copyright policy and education officer at California Digital Library, e-mail: katie.fortney@ucop. edu, Cody Hennesy is e-learning librarian at University of California-Berkeley, e-mail: chennesy@berkeley.edu, and Deborah Murphy is digital services librarian at University of California-Santa Cruz, e-mail: damurphy@ ucsc.edu © 2014 Katie Fortney, Cody Hennesy, and Deborah Murphy