I’ve been a fan of the idea
Creative Commons (CC) for several years now. The idea behind it was created by Stanford Law professor
Lawrence Lessig; to offer an alternative to traditional copyright in which the creator of the work states which uses they
grant upfront instead of the more traditional “all rights reserved” and pray that you have a good understanding of what exactly is and isn’t fair use. In that spirit science fiction author and copyright reform advocate
Cory Doctorow has been releasing his books in both print form and under a CC license. Professor Lessig has done the same. More recently other authors have started experimenting with releasing their work under CC.
About a month ago I was asked the following question: Why don’t libraries start cataloging and offering CC-licensed works? Why not, I asked myself. Why doesn’t the Commission try this. So, I spoke with others and everyone loved the idea. (At first anyway. We’ll come back to that in a moment.) The basic idea was to take electronic versions of these titles, post them on our Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, then offer them up to those that wanted them. Additionally, for some titles the license allowed for physical printing of the works so we sent those files off to the print shop to turn them into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection. (A few days later the print shop called back to question our right to print these works. A few pointers back to the CC Web site and the relevant licenses straightened it all out.)
Books and PDF files in hand, off to cataloging they went. I not being a cataloger myself I can’t give a completely accurate accounting of what I put our cataloger through, but I owe her a lunch. Some of the questions raised by these items were just who the “publisher” was and what should be listed as the publisher’s “location”. Larger issues such as whether these were newly unique editions or just reprints of a previously released edition also needed to be addressed. Discussion ensued and decisions were made. Are the records perfect, I’ll leave that for others to judge.
The end result: We now have a collection of nine CC-licensed electronic titles available through our OPAC along with seven of those titles also available as circulating print editions that we created. Also, seven of the nine titles resulted in brand new records in OCLC. (Two of them already had records for the CC versions so we just added a link to the copies on our server in the local record.) Here’s what we’ve added:
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (OCLC 192003856)
- Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow (OCLC 192003897)
- Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (OCLC 192003917)
- Trigger Happy by Stephen Poole (OCLC 192003815)
- Shike by Robert J. Shea (OCLC 192003727)
- My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust (OCLC 192003635)
- The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig (OCLC 192004088)
- Code version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig
- Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
Unfortunately, our OPAC doesn’t allow for direct linking to individual records so if you’d like to see what our local records look like you’ll either need to search for them or check out the screenshots in our Creative Commons flickr set. There you’ll also find photos of the print copies we created.
So, check it all out and let us know what you think. The plan is to continue to add other CC-licensed works as deemed appropriate in the future. Due to the costs involved the chances of creating additional print editions is small but it hasn’t been ruled out.
Oh, and we’ve already gotten responses from some of the authors involved. I had an e-mail conversation with Steven Poole as the project got started and he completely supported what we were doing with his book. Cory Doctorow left a comment on one of the photos in which he stated that it “Warms the cockles of my heart!” When I explained further what we were doing he replied with “Holy moly, Michael. This is made of awesome.” As you can probably guess, so far I’m quite happy with the project.
UPDATES:
The easiest way to find the Creative Commons collection is
search the catalog for the keywords “creative commons”.
A few new titles have been added including: Tips for Conference Bloggers (OCLC #,192095102) and the two recent
MaintainIT cookbooks for small libraries.
We’re getting some press. Cory Doctorow has posted about this project over on
BoingBoing.net and
LISNews has picked it up too.
Have you considered adding the Baen Free Library books?
Main link here: http://www.baen.com/library/
Book list here: http://www.baen.com/library/titles.htm
Great stuff. All but two of the “Bellisarius” series, for example.
– A
I didn’t consider these at first but I just took another look and for now I think we won’t be downloading and/or cataloging these titles for the following reasons:
In general Science Fiction is out of the realm of our collection development policy. (Let me clarify that in the next point.)
Baen’s books are not being released under Creative Commons which is the point of our experiment. (This is how I’ve justified the addition of the fiction mentioned above to our collection. Also, Cory’s books address many issues that I cover in my classes within his fiction.)
The electronic files supplied by Baen, when looked at independently of the Web site where you can download them from, make no indication that the reprinting and/or distribution is ok. The few titles I randomly checked contain only the standard copyright statement. Placing such material on our servers, while theoretically ok, might look questionable to someone not familiar with Baen’s program.
All that being said, I appreciate the suggestion and should they change their distribution model to Creative Commons, I would be willing to reconsider. (I’ll also be adding some of these titles to my Sony Reader tonight.) If anyone else has any suggestions please do not hesitate to submit them.
I’ve been wondering why libraries don’t do this more often for ages now (I’m currently a LIS student). You could, for example, include records for Project Gutenberg books and more. The Talking with Talis podcast with Terry Reese (28th Jan ’08) briefly touches upon how this might be deployed in Academic Libraries, with links to open source journals and Institutional Repositories. (Incidently, Cory has put this on BoingBoing now, so you might get a few more comments!)
If You can get more and more libraries doing this (OPEC software is getting more standardized with its comemrcialization and there should be an easy war or copying it oper many trimes right????) printing could be done collectively
This is truly a public service! Many thanks for taking the initiative. If you or any of your readers are going to ALA this summer in Anaheim, Cory Doctorow will be one of the featured speakers (others include: Vernor Vinge, Eric Flint, and Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing Robert Jordan’s last book) at the Imagineering Interest Group meeting on Saturday, June 28th (1:30-3:30 PM). It would be a good opportunity to thank Cory Doctorow for being an intellectual liberator, as well as for sharing his prodigious imagination. Best,
I think this is great… but.
But like all copyright mechanisms, CC licences are only a means to an end, and that end is to restrict the rights of the consumer and purchaser. Some CC licenses are unarguably vastly better than most commercial licenses. But CC is not public domain.
Every time I see a government or a library getting “into” CC, I have to ask: as opposed to what?
If the alternative is Public Domain, then moving to CC is a giant leap backwards. If you are going to spend money promoting a rights mechanism, and preserving works released under that mechanism, and putting your weight and support behind that mechanism, then let that mechanism be the Public Domain, not some “watered-down Copyright that is still undeniably Copyright”.
> CC licences are only a means to an end, and
> that end is to restrict the rights of the
> consumer and purchaser.
The only “right” that has been restricted in the cases of the books we’ve cataloged is a limit in our ability to make money off the works of others. To be honest, I have no problem with Mr. Doctorow or Mr. Lessig not giving me that “right”. It’s their work and they have the “right” to make money of of it if they choose to do so and in these cases they have. (Besides, as a government agency, should be be allowed to make money off their work regardless of any rights granted by copyright or other licensing? But that’s a much more complex topic and this is not the right forum for that.)
> But CC is not public domain.
No one claimed it was.
> Every time I see a government or a library
> getting “into” CC, I have to ask: as opposed to
> what?
As opposed to not collecting the material at all in most cases. For example, we were the first library to catalog this material in any form and as a result other libraries are being encouraged to do so. Isn’t greater access a good goal to have?
Supporting CC should not be seen as not supporting the public domain. However, the choice between (C), CC, and PD is that of the author, not of this library or any other person. Complaints that this material isn’t in the public domain should be directed at those who have the control.
As for supporting PD in general, in the case of this library we’re also one of the state government archives and therefore a significant proportion of our collection is in fact public domain material. (I don’t work in our gov docs collection but as I understand it that’s pretty much every gov doc we have in that collection.) I can not speak to the policies of other libraries in other states and of other types. (See the BoingBoing comments for related material along that line.)
I understand that you are strongly opposed to Copyright law in all its forms and at a certain level I agree; there are many parts of the existing laws that many feel should be changed. However, when an institution tries something new that at its heart is an attempt to provide increased access to materials I don’t believe that they should be criticized for not going far enough. Give us a chance, the project’s only been running for a little more than a week.
We’ve been getting a lot more press in the biblioblogosphere. Here’s what we’ve been able to find:
Jason Puckett.net
genreX
Free Government Information (FGI)
lo-fi librarian
LibraryStream
Bookninja
Attempting Elegance
Quill & Quire
The Creative Commons blog
law.librarians
Found any other references to this story? Let us know. Post a link here in the comments. Thanks!
Well, since you wrote If anyone else has any suggestions please do not hesitate to submit them:
let me, in the spirit of shameless self-promotion, plug my own CC-released book, Beasts of New York. Single-file version here.
Lest you fear this is self-published drek, I’ve also sold four novels to major publishers (HarperCollins, St. Martin’s, Hodder & Stoughton), won an award, been translated into several languages, written articles for Wired and The Walrus, etc – see my web site for details. BoNY is an odd little book, but I’m very fond of it, so I’ve made it my own Creative Commons experiment.
Best of luck with this – it’s a great idea, and I hope your readers take to it.
Jon Evans
I started to reply to Dewi Morgan’s comment above Re: creative commons vs public domain, but it got kind of long, so I have responded on my own blog instead.
The short version is, I think artists deserve some protection against outright theft of work, but the current US default copyright is ridiculous. Creative commons is a nice middle ground.
The Creative Commons Blog wrote:
“It’d be great for Michael and the NLC to document and share the specifics of the cataloging process so other libraries can try it too!”
They don’t allow for commenting on their blog so I’m posting a response here. For those wondering about the details of the cataloging process there will definitely be one way to get further details and probably another.
The definite one is at Computers in Libraries 2008 during which I’ll be presenting on CC and this project on Tuesday, April 8th at 1:30pm. (Session B203) The full presentation will be posted after the conference.
The maybe is an article published somewhere. I don’t know when that’ll happen or where it’ll be published (I’m open to suggestions) but at this point I think the need is there.
Bottom line, details are forthcoming, just not immediate.
Michael, we’ve posted the news at Open Access News. If you have further developments, please send them to our editor .
It would be great if someone curated a collection of open access books (cf. the Directory of Open Access Journals) and provided the database in a format that libraries could import into their OPAC (e.g., Serials Solutions provides the DOAJ database as part of its Access and Management Suite).
Michael, I also wanted to suggest adding a metadata field to the bib items for these books which indicates the CC license under which they’re available. You might also add a visual indicator, such as the CC mark or the Open Access logo. This provides a “teachable moment” for the patron to be introduced to Creative Commons or open access.
There are a lot of free e-books out there. Do You have any plans to add them in Your catalog?
I have put more than 20.000 in our catalot at the Gothenburg University Library in Sweden and at the same time in our national catalog LIBRIS. I can send my list (32 pages) of sources used to any library interested in free e-books. This is not Google-books!
I have “collected” two titles, one by Lessig and the book by Steven Poole.
I will use Pooles book as a pedagogical example at a conference in a couple of days.
A question
Can I find these free e-books in the OCLC catalog WorldCat?
Keep up the good work!
Jan
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4746771/
Gavin,
I love the idea of adding the license information and appropriate CC license image. I’ll check with our cataloger to see if/how we can do that.
Jan,
There are no plans at this point to start adding anything and everything we can get our hands on as tempting as that may be. We are a state government library and do have to keep our collection development poolicy in mind. Also, the current plan is to just focus on materials with CC licenses.
As for finding them in WorldCat, the OCLC numbers for the records we created are listed in the blog post. Just search using those.
i think that was a good info…
i like it
Excellent! I’m glad I found your post. I’m looking for examples of libraries who have adopted CC licenses for some of their collections (for something I’m putting together for IFLA). In your case, you’ve included CC licensed materials in your collection. Which is also a nice way to show what libraries can do as a way to support the creators.