Facet Publishing

Summary

Despite the different contexts in which art librarians serve – in universities, museums, special collections, auction houses – information literacy instruction occurs in all of them. The librarian as educator is a common enough paradigm in the 21st century, although that role often brings discomfort to practitioners with no formal training in teaching. Instructional design models provide structure and support to the librarian while creating and implementing lessons. These models engage the librarian in a systematic process, scaffolding the steps needed to create user-centred, effective instruction, whether the target audience is museum docent volunteers or graduate students. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the discipline of instructional design and some of its resources and then explores the use of a library-centred instructional design model in an undergraduate studio art classroom.

What is instructional design?

Instructional design represents both a unique discipline and an approach that all librarians designing learning experiences can integrate into their practices. Instructional design as a field grew out of the programmed instruction movement of the mid-20th century (Skinner, 1954), and the need to use new media (e.g. slides, images, film) in training settings (AECT, 2001). As technology and media have developed, instructional design as a field has similarly progressed. Today, scholars refer to the discipline as ‘the principles and procedures by which instructional materials, lessons, and whole systems can be developed in a consistent and reliable fashion’ (Molenda, Reigeluth and Nelson, 2003, 574). The idea of a systematic approach is key to instructional design because it reflects the intentional, reflective process that individuals should adopt in creating meaningful learning environments (Smith and Ragan, 2005).

Importantly, though, instructional design also represents a way of thinking about teaching and learning that individuals creating diverse educational interactions can adopt to inform their practices. Ritchey, Klein, and Tracey (2011, 3) call instructional design ‘the science and art of creating detailed specifications for the development, evaluation, and maintenance of situations which facilitate learning and performance’, and this definition of the field addresses how it can be integrated into other disciplines. Importantly, this integration needs to follow a series of steps or guidelines (take a systematic focus) so that the resulting instruction's effectiveness is consistent for all learners and measurable through assessment or evaluation.

Summary

Introduction and rationale

Within various disciplines, contextual sources such as history, theory and criticism are used to support knowledge claims. However, the discipline of art history assigns the undergraduate a particular challenge with regard to secondary source use. There is specific information that must be closely read and decoded before it can be researched and interpreted – the work itself. ‘Reading’ an artwork requires an entirely different type of literacy, one that is non-textual. Images use a unique syntax (Dondis, 1973; Yenawine, 2014). Art has its own grammar and demands visual literacy – the ability to observe, negotiate and interpret images (Yenawine, 2014). Visual literacy must be learned (Avgerinou and Ericson, 1997; Sinatra, 1986), and learning to see is itself an art (Berger, 1977; Taylor, 1981). Visual literacy is also important for learning: it develops metacognition (Perkins, 1994; Sinatra, 1986) – the awareness of one's own thinking, a precondition for achieving expertise (Zimmerman, 1990).

We live in a visual world. While visual literacy has come to be associated with an almost overwhelming set of skills and abilities (ACRL, 2011; Avgerinou and Pettersson, 2011; Bamford, 2003; Hattwig et al., 2013), there are several statements we can make with regard to teaching and learning them. Visual analysis is an active social process (Bruner, 1989), iterative (Housen, 2001) and takes time (Acton, 1997). This chapter argues that visual literacy may begin simply with the act of observation. Problems arise, however, when untutored viewing meets an almost oppressive body of art historical scholarship. On the one hand, the student should come to a work with a fresh eye (observation); on the other, the student must acknowledge precedent in secondary sources (research). If curiosity is lacking, the student will be overwhelmed by and disengaged from information when it is time to do the research. Lack of curiosity may be a function of assignment design. Any assignment that minimizes the discovery process yet demands second source treatment risks failure. It is tempting for students to plagiarize meaning when research outcomes are sketchy. A student may glance at the art object, skim an art book that tells who the artist is or was, what the artist intended based on his or her political views, or what colours mean, all without making essential connections.

Summary

User education is a vital part of the academic librarian's role. Instruction is often the best way to engage students who may be uncomfortable with visiting a library in person. Because they might be visual or tactile learners – and because visiting the library to examine collections is so essential to skilled use of an art library – users in art libraries present challenges for librarians that may not arise in the course of a standard instruction session at college or university. Like all academic librarians, art librarians work with diverse levels of research expertise, but we must also move fluidly between discussing art with practising artists and designers and discussing art with art historians and educators, bearing in mind the differences in each group's research goals and outcomes. In this section we examine the possibilities and difficulties inherent in art library instruction for artists, designers and art historians. The following chapters explore methods for weaving information literacy instruction into a studio class; the place of the ACRL threshold concepts in the visual context of art and design; how to capitalize on special collections with art history students; metaliteracy as an appropriate perspective for enlarging information literacy for visual and tactile learners; the art history student's particular research and information needs; how to employ instructional design principles; and culturally sensitive art information literacy in societies with religious restrictions on image and media consumption.

Summary

Introduction

The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) defines scholarly com - munication as ‘the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use’ (ACRL, 2006); it is the bedrock of the academic enterprise. Encompassing both formal and informal channels for the exchange of information, it extends across disparate disciplines and bridges distinct areas of expertise. It is the means by which existing scholarly knowledge is consumed, interpreted and reciprocally transformed through new scholarship.

The academic library's role in this process is substantive. By providing access to published scholarship, whether in print or electronic form, library collections increase the potential points of contact between authors and their audiences. In doing so, the library acts as a seedbed for the research of other scholars, thereby furthering the creation of new scholarship and perpetuating the scholarly communication life cycle. It thus occupies a critical point along the scholarly communication chain.

Over the past 30 years, however, scholarly communication has become unmoored from the institution it serves. This phenomenon was initially masked by the rapid expansion of academic specialization and an overall growth in library budgets in the decades after World War 2 (Henderson, 2002). Today the effects of that detachment are more readily apparent. Trends in scholarly publishing, particularly the adoption of forprofit business models, have made the library's ability to provide access to the ever-expanding volume of scholarly material increasingly problematic. Scholarship has taken on the unique identity of a commodity, one in which universities frequently invest twice: once when funding the research of faculty and students, and again when their libraries purchase that research on publication. At the same time, the proliferation of digital technology and informal internet-based networks for communication has led to powerful new models, cheaply maintained and freely accessible, for conducting and disseminating research beyond conventional academic channels, many of which bear little resemblance to the book or article format. Indeed, it is in part the wide-ranging properties of the digital environment – its capacity for inexpensive, fast and decentralized reproduction of information – that has thrown many of the less attractive aspects of traditional scholarly publishing into relief.

Summary

Social media and electronic communication are ubiquitous in the 21st century, and they have transformed the way that libraries reach out to their patrons, especially students. At a time when many people question the relevance of libraries since so much information is available immediately on the internet, it is especially important for libraries to have a strong presence where students are already spending their time to remind them of the resources, services and other great reasons they should visit. Art and design libraries in particular can make their electronic communications visually stunning with the rich images available in their collections. However, for a message to be received and understood effectively, repetition through multiple channels is always the best strategy. For that reason, libraries need to have customized and well conceived marketing plans to engage target audiences using numerous methods. The chapters in this section offer strategies and recommendations to promote the library to art and design students through marketing, social media and websites as an integral resource for their research and art practice.

Summary

Introduction

Art libraries are more likely than any other branch or special-subject libraries to maintain protected or limited access separate collections within their boundaries, known professionally as ‘special collections’ (Carter and Whittaker, 2015, 354). The reasons such distinctions are necessary are as varied as art libraries themselves. Because scholars in the discipline of art and art history study material culture, the object rendering the information itself can engender a separate meaning from the textual aspect. Much of art's literature becomes an object of study and appreciation in itself. A second reason for maintaining restricted collections is that a good deal of art documentation is still limited to physical print (often for reasons of intellectual property rights control) and these printed materials are the only form of dissemination; this unique form can become hard to replace. Books become special because of their lack of availability or cost. A third reason for maintaining restricted collections is user-driven: artists value the object qua object and digital surrogates do not satisfy that aesthetic experience.

Though few of these criteria would qualify these titles for transfer into a standalone special collection, this material falls under the whimsical library sobriquet of ‘medium rare’: housed in a restricted section of the art library. In the age of digital surrogacy and laptop delivery, the criteria for these special collections are both fast changing and long standing (Barker, 2009). As the cost of storing, cataloguing and conserving special material becomes higher than for open-stack or digital literature, art librarians as well as their administrators necessarily need to examine the question, ‘just how special is special?’ What can or should constitute an art-subject special collection in 21st-century librarianship?

Art libraries fall under three broad genres, a classification based more on their constituencies than their material content: academic, museum, and art or design school libraries. The organization and mission of the special collection within each of these library types fluctuates with the identity of the library. For example, art museum libraries can in one sense be considered standalone special collections in themselves: they are noncirculating and object-based; their items are frequently catalogued descriptively more than in other art collections; and they often supervise their readers.

Summary

Introduction

Much attention has been paid in the academy to creating active learning environments both within and outside the classroom. This focus on experiential and problem-based learning has become widely adopted or at least attempted by many in a relatively short period of time. While active learning in the fine arts has long been part of curricula (studio art, sculpture), little attention has been paid to creating a complete picture of the fine arts industry, specifically introducing the students to the juried selection, finishing and purchasing processes. Many times, collegiate artists leave their institutions with degrees but have never sold a piece of art nor know how even to approach this process.

Similarly, academic libraries’ spaces have become more collaborative in recent years, reflecting ever-changing curricula. However, with new technologies and collaboration areas, outreach and space design for scientific, social science and professional disciplines sometimes overshadow what the library could do for fine arts, specifically as exhibition space as well as curricular space.

This chapter outlines one initiative to include fine arts in the academic library space through a library-led and faculty-advised juried selection and purchasing process for fine arts students. The annual Student Art Purchase Award at Valparaiso University not only enhances fine arts students’ business acumen through experiential learning, but also increases the versatility of the library as multidisciplinary learning space.

Experiential learning as pedagogy

While art in the library is not a new concept, experiential learning in the form of independent undergraduate research is, comparatively. As a pedagogy, undergraduate experiential learning has gained much momentum in recent decades across the academy, but until recently has been largely absent from the library (Chandra, Stoecklin and Harmon, 1998; Kremer and Bringle, 1990; Russell, Hancock and McCullough, 2007).

Previously, librarians concentrated instruction efforts mostly on course-related research with little differentiation between undergraduate research and traditional curriculumbased research (Stamatoplos, 2009, 239). In fact, because these undergraduate researchers do not adhere to a traditional curriculum, ‘they can fail to recognise the potential value of interaction with librarians’ (Stamatoplos, 2009, 239). Even if librarians have started outreach to independent undergraduate researchers, little has been done to examine the library as an experiential learning space, particularly for fine arts pedagogy.

Summary

What is an artist's book?

Artists’ books were an important part of the experimentation in the visual arts that started in the late 1950s and continued into the 1960s. This was a time of anti-establishment thinking, experimental ideas and actions, seeking to get art off the wall and into the hands of the viewer and reader. Examples at that time included happenings, performance art, mail art, pop art, Fluxus and conceptual art – where concept was more important than its realization, and when there was a shift from art as an object to art as an idea. Many artists held the conviction that art must be withdrawn from its special status as rarefied experience and shared among the public at large. By the early 1970s, curators began attempting to define and describe these publications. In 1973 Diane Vanderlip curated an exhibition at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia entitled Artists’ Books, and the phrase stuck. Following this exhibition, bookshops were founded to sell and distribute these unusual publications: Art Metropole (Toronto; www.artmetropole.com/about) in 1974, Other Books & So (Amsterdam) in 1975 and Printed Matter (New York City; www.printedmatter.org/what-we-do) in 1976, among many others.

Since Vanderlip's exhibition, many people have attempted to refine the definition of what constitutes an artist's book. The simplest definition uses the Duchampian prompt: ‘It's an artist book if the artist says it is.’ In her essay ‘The Artist's Book Goes Public’ Lucy Lippard described an artist's book as ‘neither an art book (collected reproductions of separate art works) nor a book on art (critical exegeses and/or artists’ writings), the artist's book is a work of art on its own, conceived specifically for the book form and often published by the artist him/herself ‘ (1985, 45). Lippard was one of the founders of the bookshop Printed Matter, along with Sol LeWitt and others, and she would have seen the Vanderlip exhibition catalogue. Paul Bianchini, the late pop art dealer, is quoted by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix in an epigraph: ‘An artist's book is a work solely created by the artist's decisions. It is produced by the best methods to achieve quality in unlimited quantities.

Summary

Why is there a demand for a handbook of art and design librarianship? Presumably this book is needed by what I will call ‘art librarians’ (even though this entity is made up of several species, including, notably, ‘design librarians’). Would not a handbook of librarianship be enough? Well, the success of the first edition of this work, which ran to 330 pages, suggests not.

Why might art librarians, or budding art librarians, require their own specialized handbook? Perhaps it is the ‘art’ in art librarianship that is the fly in the ointment. Libraries devoted to art, or to art and design, are inevitable, for there are, after all, libraries devoted to any subject you can imagine: maritime libraries, music libraries, zoological libraries, and there are, of course, many kinds of art libraries. Even so: why do we need specialist art librarians?

It must be that art librarians bring other skills or knowledge to libraries of art. Foremost among these qualities must be a knowledge of art and design and art history – even an inside knowledge of art.

The art librarian needs not only to speak the language of art and design but also to be able to read images and objects, to be highly visually literate. That there are such requirements for the art librarian, as well as the need to be in the swim of new ideas and techniques in library science reported in such a book as this, is testimony to the challenges and complexities of connecting hungry users with their prey.

So how might such knowledge help art librarians to engage with their users? It concerns their ability to understand the terms of reference of the users, and thereby to better interpret their needs. Some users of art libraries will have far-out preoccupations; if so, one's attempts at connecting them involve the kind of process that makes art librarianship interesting. Inevitably art librarians, like other librarians, are engaged in life-long learning.

Art librarians facilitate connections between people and art, and most of these interconnections begin at the level of sharing data. Initially the librarian and the user need to agree on the nature of an enquiry through conversation, or by interrogating images. Then the enquiry might be satisfied with surrogates for art: prose, reproductions, books of images, electronic duplicates, filmic doppelgangers and other forms of information.

Summary

Academic libraries continue to wrestle with changes in higher education and their implications for library services. Over the past years, many libraries have re-evaluated the role of liaison librarians in their institutions and, in doing so, expanded their responsibilities to include greater outreach across campus with a resulting move from collection-centric models to models focused on engagement. The University of Minnesota is often cited as an early leader in this transition. Indeed, their position description framework is frequently used as a model for other research libraries. This description framework articulates several roles including campus engagement, scholarly communication, digital tools, outreach and exhibit and event planning (Jaguszewski and Williams, 2013). Since then, other areas of positional interest have and continue to emerge. In Duke University's revisioning of the liaison model, ‘Liaison librarians (subject librarians) are in the forefront of interacting with faculty, students, and researchers; their roles have been changing and will probably remain in a state of continuous change’ (Daniel et al., 2011).

Kenney (2014) identifies three emerging themes in the recent development of liaison models: engagement strategies with scholars, continued refinement of liaison roles to meet new demands, and a growing emphasis on promoting digital tools. With the expectations on liaison librarians continuing to rise, the pressure on them to ‘do it all’ can leave some with a feeling of uncertainty about how to prioritize and manage time, how to measure progress, or how to define success. As liaison models change, our tools for assessment needs to change as well. Kenney writes, ‘Shifting focus from what liaison librarians do to how their efforts impact faculty, students, and others will be critical to future development of this model’ (2014). At the same time, liaison librarians need not excel at every new skill that is added to their list of responsibilities. Instead, a more plausible aim is that of ‘continued refinement’, grounded in a liaison librarian's ability to establish useful partnerships with a colleague in the library or elsewhere on campus for leveraging relevant expertise (Jaguszewski and Williams, 2013).

Summary

As the virtual library becomes increasingly imaginable, many libraries are assessing the value of their physical spaces to determine how they can be allocated for optimal use. The space may be even more central to the mission of art and design libraries, since art and design students and faculty presumably bring a visual sensibility and environmental awareness to their engagement with the library. Browsing through print materials is an activity that requires the physical library, and it endures as an important activity for art and design library users, who appreciate the potential for serendipitous discovery, inspiration, and understanding that open-ended searching offers. Although many databases and online resources offer browsing modes, leafing through print publications remains a critical step in the design and ideation process. Libraries have also begun to understand the value of the library as place – as a destination for users seeking an environment conducive to study, contemplation and the exchange of information. Beyond those activities, dedicated classroom space for user education is more frequently a planning priority, as accrediting agencies encourage information literacy as a campus - wide learning outcome. The utopian condition for the library stems from its essential nature as a third place, an academic town square, a neutral zone that enables dialogue, and a space that nurtures productivity.

Summary

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. (Jimmy Wales)

This bold and challenging vision set out by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales is familiar to anyone working in libraries and cultural heritage. After all, we have been providing exactly this sort of service for centuries by giving (in most cases) free at the point of use access to our collections to people who visit our libraries, archives, galleries and museums, whether at local, institutional or national level. Many of the people who have over time benefited from this access have taken what they have read, seen, experienced or learned and gone on to create new knowledge, new art, new inventions and new discoveries. In this information revolution that is the digital era, we can in new and significant ways extend our reach beyond the physical constraints of our buildings and our analogue books, manuscripts, maps, paintings and artefacts. We can today share our collections with the wider, global world, thanks to innovations like digital photography, the internet and the world wide web. To ensure that everyone who visits us digitally has the same opportunities to use, learn from and be inspired by our resources as those who visit us physically, we must endeavour to provide free and open access to our digital collections. The tool for achieving this is open licensing. When we apply open licences to our resources we ensure that cultural heritage organisations continue to play a central role in supporting access to information and knowledge at a global level. In doing so, organisations play their part in turning Wales’ imagined world of free universal access to all human knowledge into reality.

This book will provide you with the insight, knowledge and confidence necessary to implement an open licensing approach within a gallery, library, archive or museum. The rewards of being open can be significant, and the costs and risks can be much lower than anticipated. Some of the biggest successes of modern communication and business, such as the internet and the world wide web, are derived from and based on being open. Openness, at its core, can expose the ‘prior art’ that sits within our collections.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores the background, history and development of the open movement. It explains that the beginnings of the movement can be traced to the early days of digital computing and open source software, and that the role of free access to government information and the founding of the web have significantly influenced the movement. It looks at the history of open government, open access, open education, open data and organisations that advocate for openness.

Openly sharing our knowledge, experience, content and culture for free is not a new idea or concept. Sharing is an innate and natural part of our human charac - ter. We take this sharing for granted and most of the time pay it little attention. Take a moment to look and listen and you will see that you are completely surrounded by the products and outputs of our shared intelligence and experience:

Summary

Introduction

Newcastle Libraries are the public libraries serving the citizens of the City of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Newcastle is the biggest city in the North East of England and its library service, in particular the City Library, attracts users from across the region and beyond. The City Library houses the local studies and family history collections – this section also regularly receives requests and enquiries from overseas customers.

In the early 2000s a funded project allowed Newcastle Libraries to digitise a large part of its local history photographic collections and to publish them on a dedicated website called Tyneside Life and Times. However, a few years later the website encountered technical difficulties and the photographs were moved to the Flickr image hosting platform in June 2009. When the Flickr albums were created the images’ legal status appeared as the default copyright setting (Figure 8.1 on the next page). Download was originally disabled but this was changed early on, although this particular feature was never publicised. Apart from the Torday collection (1000 photographs of 1960s–1970s Newcastle), which was digitised by a volunteer and uploaded to a new album, the historic images collection on Flickr has only been extended ad hoc.

Commons Are Forever

In 2015 I started developing the project Commons Are Forever at Newcastle Libraries, with support from the Carnegie UK Trust's Library Lab programme. Commons Are Forever aimed to empower people by informing them of their rights to use and reuse works that are either in the public domain or available under an open licence, and encourage them in turn to share their creations with others. The project took the form of a series of events where members of the public were invited to create their own artworks in workshops facilitated by local artists, while learning about copyright and where to find free-to-use content.

A secondary goal of the project was to firmly re-position the library service as a place for the sharing of culture. Public libraries are traditionally making knowledge and culture accessible through loaning materials to members of the community, but I believe raising awareness of works that are out-of-copyright – in the public domain and belonging to all – or under open licences is also part of libraries’ role.

Summary

Introduction

From unplanned, somewhat opportunistic beginnings, the National Library of Scotland has been openly licensing resources since 2008. The Library's approach to open licensing has taken a more strategic and considered direction since 2014 by developing structured policies and procedures. In this case study we examine this, from the Library's early openness steps driven primarily by external factors to the Library's more recent approaches to being open, which derive from greater internal drivers while continuing to be informed and inspired by external developments. We argue that this development process demonstrates how, even when setting out initially with no openness plan, cultural heritage organisations can develop open approaches and use open licences successfully.

Exploring external drivers

The National Library of Scotland's earliest use of open licences begins with the web. The Library's first website was developed in the mid-1990s, driven by the potential to reach a larger, more diverse audience. Mainly text-based, this first website iteration had only a few images, including the Library's logo and a few of the Library's treasured collection items.

This lack of imagery was not unusual for the time. Expensive, low-resolution (compared with today) digital cameras were in their infancy and just being introduced to the non-professional market. Tools to manipulate digital images were basic. Domestic connection speeds were slow, between 28 and 56 kilobytes per second, more than 1000 times slower than the fibre speeds (up to 76 megabytes per second) we are familiar with today, so users were likely to be dissuaded by image and data-rich websites.

All text and images on this first website iteration were marked ‘© Copyright Trustees of the National Library of Scotland’. Open licensing, largely limited at this time to the software industry, was not considered. Easily accessible, publicfocused, generic open licences, such as Creative Commons licences, were not yet available. This type of ‘all rights reserved’ copyright notice was used less by design and more by default: there were no real alternatives, nor was the intellectual openness of this nascent communication channel high on the organisational agenda.

Digitisation efforts at the Library commenced around this time, progressing in an ad hoc manner with basic scanners and digital camera equipment. The initial aim of this work was to create images for the website and for exhibitions.

Summary

There is a risk to not being open, and not being open now will cost us money in the future.

This case study describes how the University of Edinburgh plans its approach to open educational resources in support of learning and teaching and offers suggestions to others working to make open educational resources sustainable in higher education institutions. It offers a clear value proposition for aligning open educational resources activities within institutional budgets and strategies for learning, teaching and research in the context of a digital university. Many cultural institutions making the move towards open practice struggle with the challenges of securing high-level ‘buy-in’ to support such initiatives; this case study also considers the institutional risks of ‘open washing’ and neglecting staff development in this area.

The University of Edinburgh leads the Scottish higher education sector in having a published open educational resources policy in place and a central service to support staff development in using open educational resources for learning and teaching. The University promotes and incentivises open educational practice in a range of ways through course design, institutional infrastructure and open knowledge partnerships, including hosting a Wikimedian in Residence to embed open practices inside and outwith the curriculum.

The University of Edinburgh context

Discussion started about an open educational resources policy for the University of Edinburgh in 2014. A high-level task group was established, including key opinion shapers from around the University and the Student Association (EUSA). The task group aimed to explore how high quality learning materials could be made open, not only for students within the University, but across Scotland and to the wider world.

At the time the University was riding the wave of global interest in massive open online courses (MOOCs) and in the light of the upcoming independence referendum many in Scotland saw a strategic opportunity to contribute to a fairer society via open educational practice. The resulting open educational resources vision for the University of Edinburgh has three strands designed to help learning technologists and academic colleagues decide which materials to release and where. The University of Edinburgh open educational resources policy was published to deliver the vision in 2016 and to support colleagues in making positive decisions for open practice.

Summary

Since it first began to digitise items from its collections during the 1990s, the National Library of Wales has embraced digital technologies as a means of widening access to readers beyond the four walls of its iconic building in Aberystwyth. Facilitating access to its collections in this way has been a key strategic aim for the Library for many years, underpinned by the Theatre of Memory, a long-term vision of providing digital access to everything ever published in or about Wales. In the last ten years, significant strides towards realising this vision have been made by delivering the large-scale digitisation projects Welsh Journals Online (https://journals.library.wales/) and Welsh Newspapers Online (http://newspapers.library.wales/), and allowing access to collections in a range of other formats – including photographs, artworks, maps, manuscripts and archives – through the Library's core digitisation programme and other projects.

The National Library of Wales from the outset committed to the principle of providing digital services that are free at the point of access. With the opportunities that digital technologies offer for reproduction, distribution and repurposing as well as viewing, the discussion inevitably led to questions of reuse. In 2009 the Library was among the first cultural organisations in the UK to share items from its collection on Flickr Commons (www.flickr.com/photos/llgc/), permitting their free and unrestricted use. In 2010, thousands of images were published on the Welsh Government's People's Collection Wales website (www.peoplescollection.wales/) under the Creative Archive Licence, similar to the CC BY-NC-SA licence. In 2012, the Library made its most important policy decision in relation to the digitisation and reuse of its collections to date by declaring that it would not claim ownership of copyright in digital reproductions per se. This new position of ‘what goes into the public domain would stay in the public domain’, as described by Europeana, would have far-reaching consequences for the way in which the National Library of Wales's digitised collections were accessed and reused.

Since forming its current policy on copyright in digital reproductions, the National Library of Wales has faced what may possibly be the most challenging time in its history. On 26 April 2013, World Intellectual Property Day, the Library published a press release announcing its new position on copyright in digital reproductions. The Library did indeed make the news that day, but not because of its new policy.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter describes what you, your colleagues and people who use your services and content need to know about using and reusing openly licensed resources. It also outlines a range of tools, techniques and services that can be used to help find and correctly attribute open content and explains how to distribute resources to third party services where they can reach more users and have greater impact.

Correct use of open resources

The internet is awash with an ever-increasing wealth of openly licensed resources, all of which is available to organisations to use and reuse for almost any purpose: there are images that can be used in presentations, posters and documents, texts and data to support research, courseware and videos to help train staff, operating systems and software applications to underpin business processes, and your organisation's own open content. By using open material you not only champion and support the open movement but are likely to save your organisation money, since open resources are generally free to use and repurpose.

It is important to make proper and correct use of openly licensed resources, and to ensure staff have at least a basic grasp of the obligations set out in open licences. Like your users, staff do not need to develop an in-depth knowledge of open licensing, but need enough of an understanding to use open resources correctly so as not to expose the organisation to the risks associated with misuse, inadvertent or otherwise.

Staff should be aware of the most common types of open licences that they are likely to encounter when sourcing resources for reuse. This requires explanation and documentation in plain and clear language about licensing frameworks, such as Creative Commons licences, the Open Government Licence and GNU licences. As Creative Commons is the open licensing framework most used in the cultural heritage sector it is worth going into more detail to explain the concepts of Attribution, ShareAlike, NonCommercial and NoDerivatives. Creative Commons Australia's colourful licensing fact sheet, which is openly licensed itself (under a CC BY licence), could be a useful starting point and can be adapted to suit the needs of your organisation. Staff require a basic understanding of the public domain and the parameters of copyright duration for works in different formats and within different jurisdictions.

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