building bridges: digital asset licensing at the national library of scotland

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Building Bridges: Digital asset licensing at the National Library of Scotland Fred Saunderson National Library of Scotland Presented to Digital Transformation: Supporting Culture Shift in Museums, Museums Galleries Scotland, Glasgow, 27 March 2015

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Building Bridges: Digital asset

licensing at the National Library of

Scotland

Fred Saunderson

National Library of ScotlandPresented to Digital Transformation: Supporting Culture Shift in Museums,

Museums Galleries Scotland, Glasgow, 27 March 2015

NOT a cliché

I really am going to talk about the

construction of bridges

…and the destruction of bridges

Building a bridge: Construction of the Forth Bridge, 1886-7, photograph by Philip Phillips.

Digital surrogate CC0 by National Library of Scotland, available on Wikimedia Commons

http://digital.nls.uk/74570334

Destruction of a bridge: Tay Bridge enquiry, 1879

Digital surrogate CC0 by National Library of Scotland, available on Wikimedia Commons

http://digital.nls.uk/74585092

1. Why licensing

2. Our process

3. Lessons learned

1. Licensing digital assets

• No consistent digital content licensing

• Ad hoc use of the CC-BY-NC-SA licence

• Two broadly competing interests:

– To widen access

– To generate income

• Licensing is crucial for both: What can you

do with this item?

• A licence like CC-BY-NC-SA is crucial for

income generation because of the ‘NC’

element, which provides the means to

monetise commercial use of the asset

• Equally, licences are essential for widening

access – all parts of the licence (CC, BY,

NC and SA) demonstrate how the asset

may be used. In other words ‘not all rights

are reserved’

2. Our process

• We needed a single policy for licensing the

digital content (and metadata!) that we

create, particularly when there are no

underlying rights

• We wanted to stick with Creative

Commons licences – robust, known,

simple

• Several licensing options tabled internally

Q4 2013-14

• To address those two ‘competing’

interests, we opted for a mixed approach:

– Digital content would be split between

‘high’ quality and ‘low’ quality

– Low quality digital content, and

metadata, would be licensed with a

Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence

– High quality digital content would be

licensed with a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

licence

– There would be exceptions (e.g. third

party rights)

Policy is up for review next month

Low quality

digital conten

t

High quality

digital conten

t

Metadata CC0

CC-BY-NC-SA

Exceptions

• The Metadata and Digital Content

Licensing Policy was approved April 2014

• We began trial releases with ‘safe’ content

– no third party rights restrictions

• We (well, our Wikimedian Ally Crockford)

released about 1,000 images under a CC0

licence

• The Forth Bridge, the Tay Bridge, Scotia

Depicta, Jacobite Broadsides, etc.

• These went onto Wikimedia Commons

• As of February 2015, Commons images

from the Library are on 248 English

language Wikipedia pages + dozens more

non-English pages

• These pages were viewed a total of

1,216,063 times in February 2015

• Over the period May 2014-February 2015,

Wikipedia pages containing Library images

received 13,188,764 views

• We have uploaded only 1,000 images

Source: BaGLAMa 2, http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama2/index.html#gid=157

Publication vs. distribution

Publication (proactiv

e, directly available t

o all)

Distribution (point to point,

reactive on request, suppli

ed for a specific use)

3. Lessons learned

• Terminology can be a challenge (‘low’

quality v. ‘access’ quality)

• Content sizes can be a big challenge: what

is ‘low’/‘access’ quality? What should

people expect to be able to do with this

content?

• What is you business model? (e.g. income,

profit, cost recovery?)

• What are your costs?

• Back end systems

• Consistent licensing

http://digital.nls.uk/74570334

Fred Saunderson

National Library of Scotland

Except where otherwise stated this work by National Library of Scotland is licensed under

a

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.