Copyright

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Commons explorer

You probably know Flickr Commons, long an incredible source of images from some of the world’s greatest library and museum collections. All images in the Commons have “no known copyright restrictions” and can be used, mashed up, tagged and added to your own Flickr galleries.

Many of the big names are there: Australian War Memorial, Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Powerhouse, and the National Libraries of Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Scotland.

There are also many smaller but astonishing collections which offer a wide range of digitised historical images of everything from maritime history to cowgirls to warfare to Antarctic expeditions. The number of institutions involved increases all the time.

Now there’s also a great new way of exploring the collections: commonsExplorer, from Creative Canberra.

Browse interface, CommonsExplorer

Browse interface, CommonsExplorer

It’s a quickly downloaded browsing interface that gives you, and students, a more visual view of the collections and the images. You can scroll through the list of all the participating institutions, then either search through the tag cloud or window shop through the pop-ups for images.

Tag cloud

Tag cloud

FUSE learning resource: CC sMash

CC sMash, created by The Arts Centre, will be released on August 18th and will allow students to create, attribute, and share their own audio work, while learning about using material correctly via the creative commons open license framework. The creative commons site provides a library of sound from which to create your mashups. This site is a must to show to your school’s music teachers and ICT teachers, who can start planning to bring their students plenty of fun mixed with learning.

CC sMash 

Guest post: CC with Julie Jenkins

Julie Jenkins is a library technician at Mooroopna Secondary College, Mooroopna, Victoria, and is often approached by staff wanting to know information about creative commons and copyright. Julie has been kind enough to provide a guest post on her knowledge of creative commons and the resources she turns to when asked the tough questions.

As a library technician at Mooroopna Secondary College I get asked quite often about the rules on using Creative Commons.

 

Copyright is a minefield but when using something that is licensed under Creative Commons (CC) it is a lot easier.  The creator has already given permission for us to use their work under certain conditions. You must remember that CC material is not copyright free and you can still breach the licence by not meeting the conditions that the creator has chosen.  A great website to check out for information about the different licence symbols and conditions when using material licensed under Creative Commons is Smartcopying.  On this website there are two easy to understand animations that explain what creative commons is.  Also on this website there are some really good information sheets on Creative Commons, one of these is ‘Creative Commons: A quick overview’.   I recommend that you have a look at this website as it will help you to answer any question you have and I suggest that you put the URL into your favorites for later use. 

 

I find copyright so hard to understand but the Australian Copyright Council does have a good website and they also run training sessions each year.  I went to a couple of training session in Melbourne last year and found them very interesting (if you can find copyright interesting).  The publications they offer are very good also.

Thankyou, Julie, for providing Bright Ideas readers with this post and useful links. Makeuseof published a post in April on ‘How to find creative commons content with Google’. This will also help us in trying to make sure we aren’t in breach of anything!

Image search tools

Danny Nicholson, from The Whiteboard Blog: Supporting technology in the classroom (a fantastic blog for information on activities for the IWB), wrote a great post called ’12 useful image search tools’. The post gives practical examples and tools that will help you and your students find images that do not breach someone’s copyright.

12 useful image search tools