Copyright for creators

This guide is available in print from the NWHC library.

As consumers of information, music, films and other works, we come across Copyright which is a measure protecting the authors’ rights.

Any content we create is also protected by Copyright. We take photos, compose and record music, create PowerPoint presentations, write blogs and computer games, twitter etc. Other people should not use the works created by us (e.g. publish our texts on their blogs, perform our music on public, use our photographs in newsletters) without our permission or at least acknowledging us as their authors.

There are exceptions to this rule, most notable are: performing, copying or lending works for educational purposes, and using works for personal study or research.

Copyright is an automatic right. The author does not have to do anything special for her/his rights to be respected and protected by law.

For more details about Copyright (as well as Top 10 Copyright Myths) see http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/

Creative Commons

The traditional forms of Copyright enforcement are often less helpful for digital works (digital photographs, computer stored music, website templates etc.) than for more traditional ones like printed books and films on DVDs.

Nowadays, we are happy to share our works with other people and upload them online where it’s easy to copy and make changes to them. At the same time we may want to be assured that other people do not present our works as their creation.

For this purpose, a new set of licenses was created. It is called Creative Commons. These licenses allow a creator to be quite specific about the ways he/she wants those works to be used; for example, it is possible to specify that a work can be freely copied or shared providing it is properly attributed to the author, that it cannot be used for commercial purposes and cannot be changed in any way.

All the Creative Commons licenses are explained in a formal, but easy to understand language at http://creativecommons.org/international/uk/.

Normally, it is sufficient to add to a work or its metadata (e.g. each mp3 file carries data about the title, composer, performer of the track etc.; this is called metadata; normally all the digital works like photographs, videos etc. carry metadata too) a short phrase like This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

There is a tool which can help to choose an appropriate license and its wording (as well as with registering a work if it’s to be uploaded online) - http://creativecommons.org/choose/.

A number of large websites use Creative Commons. The most notable is Flickr. Millions of people use those licenses for their simplicity and flexibility.

There are search engines which allow finding Creative Commons licensed works, e.g. http://search.creativecommons.org/. Also Google’s advanced search allows to filter down images according to their license, e.g. to look for only those which can be freely copied and legally shared.

For more information about Copyright for digital works, see a book Digital Copyright by Paul Pedley - http://bit.ly/5hdpYu.


Copyright for creators by Ihar Ivanou, North Warwickshire and Hinckley College, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Participatory media

Yesterday I went to Blogs, Wikis and Social Networking session organised by a local JISC (the governmental agency promoting use of technologies in education).

Already the first conversation brought a surprise - one of the participants was a HR person from one of FE colleges (I did not expect to meet there anyone but librarians and a handful of teachers). She was after ideas for developing internal communication in the College as the traditional ways like newsletters and emails are not sufficient enough any more. It was refreshing to see that not only librarians are taking the reality of fragmented information landscapes seriously.

There was a lot of discussion around threats (to safety, traditional literacy), barriers (to information as experienced by less digitally savvy people), difficulties (bandwidth, waste of time) etc.

I was left with the question whether damage to an institution from not having a blog (or not being present on, let us say, Facebook; or discouraging employees from creative use of "participatory media") is greater than from having it and dealing with a number of serious chllenges and/or unwanted consequences. It's not even the matter of allowing or blocking access. It's rather a question of institutional culture: are creativity and responsibility encouraged or anything that is "un-official" is discouraged? are staff provided with help and advice on positive engagement with the web? is learners' voice - freely expressed, not pre-selected and beautifully pre-packaged - is present in the whole picture of what the institution (College) is like?

If such participation, responsibility and trust are encouraged, the whole discourse about the institution will be quite different - not as polished as we are used to see it in glossy prospectuses, but much livelier, first-hand accounts of people's experiences. It sounds challenging and even scary, but isn't it what we actually enjoy reading and trust the most? That's why the old school editorial control on the web seems to be of limited value.

Perth College's blogging experience is very interesting from a librarians' point of view. They have two blogs, for users and for their own staff. The first one is used for sharing news. I like the idea of emphasising the new resources purchased. Pity, Heritage does not allow current awareness output in RSS feeds at the moment, otherwise it'd be easy to embed such updates into Moodle pages and Facebook. Another blog is for staff development within the team. The weak point for developing a SD blog is Outlook which - in its current incarnation - does not allow RSS feeds import along with emails. It's not clear to me how to create just one space where all the content and messages intended for the library staff could come and sit together. Will we remember to visit a blog regularly if it's been created?!

An interesting discussion took place during the lunch break. What happens to all the profiles and pages if their owner dies, especially if dies unexpectedly? There was a lot of fun discussing wills which should now include something about Facebook profile management.

One memorable quote from the day? - It's from the Tame The Web blog: "a core value of librarianship - community building". People want to communicate, create and share, learn from each other... where other ways fail - teachers do not have time, insufficient funding, digital divide - librarians (in FE) create physical and virtual spaces for self-guided study and connecting.

One blog post that I made a note of to look at later on more carefully was Should You Friend Your Students? The Short Answer Is No by Josie Fraser from JISC in Leicester. I am pleased that some comments were critical - I do not believe in complete separation of personal and professional life. I mean, it's possible, but rather unhelpful, in my opinion.

Wikis... we used them with Early Years learners last year and it was not as successful as I hoped. Potentially, it can be a great way for keeping library procedures up-to-date and easily editable.

A fantastic characteristic of wikis which I will constantly use when talking to students about Wikipedia: it has a fluid content. It's its strength and weakness at the same time.

Another example of people's desire and need to speak, contribute, being heard - Write To Reply. We do need editors who would inspire learners and staff to write to bulletins, websites, Facebook pages...

A similar session will take place in Nottingham in February.

Image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1108254

PinkladyC's moment of fame

Leicester Mercury published an article about campaign for better support of kinship carers - people caring for the children of family or friends. It mentions one of our 2+2 Early Years students, Sandy Chamberlain. Well done! It's so great when what we are interested in and are passionate about materialise in many different facets - personal life, education, job, hobbies, voluntary work!

Sandys' blog is http://pinkladyc1.blogspot.com/

A good place to keep all your online videos together

Try http://vodpod.com - it's a good place to keep all your online videos (e.g. from YouTube) together and have access to them from any computer with internet access.

Delicious bookmarks

It's a terrible crime to send anybody a list of blog URLs in a Word file! :)

Delicious.com is a beautiful tool to keep all your bookmarks together and share them with the world. It allows to hide those bookmarks which you'd prefer people not to see; you can assign tags, bundle them, create lists and collections, like this one - http://delicious.com/nwhc/bundle:ChildStudies

It's green, ethical, kind and everything - to keep bookmarks online and share them, I think.