User:Daniel Mietchen/Talks/Archiving 2014/Open licenses in the cultural heritage context/Abstract

Title

Open licenses in the cultural heritage context

Logistics

Time: 2 hours

Course materials will be available from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Talks/Archiving_2014/Short_Course_on_Open_Licensing .

Instructor: Daniel Mietchen, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin & Open Knowledge Foundation Germany

Content

Permissions play a key role in managing collections, especially digital ones. They define who can access which parts of the collection, what they or their tools can do with items in the collection, and how these items or the work performed with them can be shared, reused in other contexts, modified or enriched with materials available from elsewhere. While classical copyright and related legal frameworks place a focus on restricting the use of materials under their purview, the purpose of open licenses is to enable interested parties to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute digital materials. In the cultural heritage context, open licensing is both a challenge and an opportunity, and the aim of this short course is to highlight some basic options for navigating those waters, illustrated with examples of interactions between cultural heritage institutions and Wikimedia projects.

Benefits

This course enables attendees to:

• Learn what open licenses are, why they exist and how they work
• Understand the differences between some key standard licenses (especially Creative Commons licenses)
• Evaluate their own institution's licensing policy in terms of compatibility with reuse on platforms like Wikipedia

Intended Audience

Professionals curating digital collections or responsible for making public collections available to the public

Biographical sketch

Daniel Mietchen is a biophysicist working on the integration of scholarly workflows with the Web, for which open licenses are a crucial ingredient. Working at the Museum für Naturkunde to make biodiversity information available to researchers and the public, he volunteers for the Open Knowledge Foundation and is an active participant in numerous other open initiatives, including Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia.