On using Creative Commons for old documents
When the University of Cambridge, with help from the University of Sussex (and JISC funding), released its Newton Papers, there was widespread acclaim for the resultant website, but also some criticism of their use of Creative Commons.
Some bloggers (here and here) asserted that the (seventeenth-century) documents are out of copyright and therefore should be labelled as public domain.
It seems a common sense argument, but this ignores the actual state of UK and the complexity of digitising fragile material.
UK Copyright law implies that digitised images can create their own copyright, if the digitisation is of high-quality.* A quick snap with a cameraphone of an ancient document does not accrue copyright; but a complex procedure involving conservation, handling, colour calibration, adjusting lighting conditions, careful focussing does create copyright in the resultant digital image. The contextual infrastructure to actually deliver the Digital Library also required serious investment of time and money.
Thus in the case of Newton Papers, Cambridge do have a right to assert Creative Commons over their digitised versions of the papers.
It also should be noted that the Cambridge licence used is still very liberal – as long as you don’t make money from it and attribute the source you can use it in any way you want, including creating derivative images. A few years ago, it was a very rare university that would have gone near such an open licence.
* However, it should be noted that this implication has never been tested in a UK courtroom. It was tested in the USA (in the Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. case), but the result in favour of Corel is not binding in the UK. The dispute between the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery is also interesting in this respect.
“Collaborate to Compete”: where does this leave content?
The OER projects in the JISC Content programme 2011-13 recently attended a workshop on “Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)”, organised by the Open Unviersity’s SCORE team.
All projects focus on the digitization of primary material from special collections covering a variety of subjects, from fashion design to architectural drawings and microscopic rock slides. Each project also produces a number of OERs by packaging, or “cooking up”, the “raw” digital assets for embedding in HE courses as well as for wider use and re-use.
Paraphrasing the HEFCE report on online learning, the first speaker, Andy Lane, got the audience thinking about what “Collaborate to Compete” meant to them within the context of creating and making available Open Educational Resources for students and teachers.
A stimulating discussion followed; here are some of the highlights:
• all of the projects recognised the benefits of working in partnership, in particular for the opportunity it offers to bring together content from different HE institutions as well as from other domains, such as the private or heritage sector
• individual academics are on the whole happy to collaborate with colleagues from other institutions, even if their own institutions might be seen as competing with each other within a particular subject discipline
• following from the above, it was noted that competition among universities belonged more to the institutional level or the “marketing” department, and individual teachers perhaps felt that pressure less
• sometimes, however, people felt they had to collaborate because they “were told” to do so – not least by funders
• competition is felt more strongly within the research community than the teaching community, but there were different views on this
• collaboration had to allow for institutions to retain their own identity, especially when creating joint outputs such as OERs and making content available more broadly
• although making open content available reflected positively on an institution’s status and sense of identity, it was recognised that from a student’s point of view open content in itself wouldn’t necessarily constitute a reason for selecting the institution where to study, especially as “open content” would be available to them anyway
• recognition that there is a range of “openess” when we speak about content, and while institutions are willing to make some of their content openly available they will also jealously protect other content – the decision often based on potential revenue generating models, such as selling courses outside of the formal HE sector
• “content” was likened to the music industry: what is valuable (=attracts students = makes money) is not the content itself (= music), after all students will find some content or other somewhere, through more or less legal means, that they will be able to use, but the way content is experienced by students.
So, is content king, on its own? It seems not.
The way content/OER is used within an institution – what teachers and students do with it, how it is integrated within the curriculum to engage students, promote active participation, encourage peer working and interaction, enhance learning opportunities and ultimately the student experience as part of a community within a particular institution – is what makes the difference.
And this difference has quite a bit to do with where institutions will compete.
Scanning Fossils in 3D at the British Geological Survey
One of the largest and strangest archives in the UK is the collection of the British Geological Survey. Its mammoth collection store, just outside Nottingham, holds thousands of fossils but also pallets and pallets of rocks samples, often taken as samples prior to oil drilling.
JISC has recently funded the Survey to lead a nationwide project to begin a UK fossil collection, including the 3D digitisation of some of the most relevant pieces.
The fossil is placed on the turntable, and the same piece of hardware takes a 2D image (via a digital lens) and 3D image (via a laser). The 2D image has captured colour whilst the 3D image have captured texture and shape, but only from a single viewpoint.
So the turntable then turns a set number of degrees, and more 2D and 3D images are taken until 360
degrees are completed.
The digitisation operator then has a suite of images to merge together.
There is some manual cleaning up (e.g. removing the turntable from the image) and then the operator clicks at similar points on related images.
From this, the software can merge the images together to form a single 3D digital object.
The project aims to digitise 4,000 fossils as part of its JISC funding. They will be made openly available via a variety of formats, allowing users to inspect them online (via Adobe 3D PDFs), download them for use in their own software (such as the open source MeshWeb) or even recreate the fossils using 3D printers.
Good interfaces – Isaac Newton and Criminal Data
A couple of JISC funded content projects have recently gone live, and they are worth having a look through as they provide excellent examples of good interfaces for digital content
One is the papers of Isaac Newton, a joint project between Cambridge and Sussex, whilst the other is Locating London’s Past, which involves Sheffield, Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research and the Museum of London.
The Newton Papers are digitised to a beautifully high resolution, and have viewing facilities that allow users to view individual pages but also to get the sense of a collection of papers through which one can turn pages. Cambridge are also using a Creative Commons licence. Clicking on teh download link brings up a pop-up box that allows.
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton
Locating London’s Past exploits a range of data related to early modern London. It’s a more complex tool than the Newton papers, but they’ve handled the ability to integrate and mash up different data soruces (e.g. trial reports, tax reports, and archaeological finds) via Google Maps.
http://www.locatinglondon.org/