Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

["Paul Reynolds" <paul.reynolds AT mcgovern.co.nz>]

The NZETC has posted up new material from the Beaglehole collection.

I blogged on this at

www.peoplepoints.co.nz

 

The post sparked a response asking whether the material could be put in the CC.

I in turn asked Alison Stevenson of NZETC who posted an interesting and thoughtful response.

I quote it below  - but see the original post for the context:

http://mcgovernonline.blogspot.com/2007/09/nzte-beaglehole-early-essays-on-captain.html

 

There are obviously big issues here – but it does make the case for a NZ ported licence all the stronger – additionally, makes an even stronger case for  our primary heritage /memory  / scholarship communities to take leadership in this area – for example  putting something like the Official History of the Second World seems a great place to start.

 

I wonder if anyone from MCH is on this list and would like to comment ?

The Alison quote is below..

Best

p.

 

 

 

<quote>

Hi Hamish and Paul,

I agree entirely that the more digital content we can make broadly accessible for reuse the better. One of the things on our to-do list at the NZETC is to make the vast majority of our collection available in this way, most probably under a Creative Commons attribution license.

 

Although it is not really clear from the website at the moment we always agree to requests to reuse out of copyright texts or images that we have made available online and would happily share the raw TEI XML if someone had an interesting idea on how to reuse it - text mining, corpus analysis, revisualisation etc. However the more restrictive blanket statement you quote is necessary because some of the works in the collection do remain under copyright and it is not within our purview to give permission for their republication or reuse.

 

Examples of such works include the entire Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War (rights administered by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage), the online archive of the literary journal Sport (copyright retained by the individual contributors) and the J C Beaglehole essays themselves (copyright held by Tim Beaglehole).

 

To encourage copyright holders of significant New Zealand texts to allow us to make them publicly available we need to be able to assure them that their rights and control of the work will be retained (if that is what they want). Being able to point to the "Conditions of Use" statement has proved very helpful in that regard and allow us to provide public access to some texts that might otherwise have remained as limited copies in rare book collections.

So, watch this space really - once we've completed the implementation and visualisation of a more fine grained rights information layer I hope your enthusiasm for the material will be unbound!

Alison (Director, NZETC)

 

paul reynolds

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