Ever wondered how it must have been for some of the first cultural heritage institutions to embark on their open access journey? Michael Weinberg, Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, talked to three major institutions that helped shape the early open GLAM / open culture movement to find out. Here’s what he found. 

The list of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) with open access programs gets longer every day. However, those programs don’t just happen. They are the result of work from teams inside and outside of the institution.

Like the commons they create, the open access programs build on one another.  Each open access program launched today uses lessons learned from programs that came before.

“Pioneers of Open Culture” contains three case studies of open GLAM early adopters.  It examines some of the institutions that created open access programs in the early days of the movement.  

The National Gallery of Art (United States), Statens Museum for Kunst, and New York Public Library are different institutions. They have different funding models, different relationships to government, and different styles of public engagement.  In the years since they started, their open access programs have taken different directions.  However, all three pioneered their own versions of successful open access programs.

None of these institutions would claim to have built their programs alone.  They were part of communities, discussions, and practices that evolved along with them.  At the same time, these institutions navigated their environment with many fewer models than are available today.  That forced them to learn lessons that today’s institutions can take for granted.  These case studies help shed light on that process.   

Pioneers of Open Culture is not a comprehensive analysis of each institution’s open access program.  It also does not explore all of the institutions that contributed to the early days of the open culture movement.  Instead, it is an exploration of how some of the people who created and operated these programs understood their work.  The goal is to provide a window into the process. This window might help those who want to follow similar paths.

While each case study has conclusions specific to the institution, a few points of commonality do begin to emerge:

Digital Infrastructure Matters. 

Successful open access programs are built on digital foundations that directly incorporate rights and rights awareness.  Digital systems redesigns were opportunities to build the possibility of open into an institution’s DNA.  Well designed digital backends also made it easier to experiment with smaller projects that were not true one-offs, but rather closely integrated into the institution’s technology infrastructure.

Experimentation is Important.

Collections are diverse, as are the users who are interested in them. Open access programs succeed when there is space to try new things, and create multiple points of entry into an institution’s collections. This is true for members of the public who want to explore the collection.  It is also true of internal stakeholders who want to understand how open access can help them achieve their own goals.  Space takes the form of financial support from within and without the institution.  It also takes the space of an institutional environment that is welcoming to experimentation.

Make the Easy Things Easy.

Open access programs can be challenging to construct and sustain.  Technology must be built.  Collections must be designed.  Rights statuses must be documented.  That makes it important to use tools that make things easier whenever they exist.  Those tools include legal tools, such as the CC0 public domain dedication, and technical tools, such as open source software.  The reliability of these tools allows teams to focus on the hard parts of creating open access collections.

“Pioneers of Open Culture” brings color and context to the history of open access.  Hopefully, understanding that history can help accelerate open access programs yet to be created, and encourage people to embark on better sharing of cultural heritage worldwide.

What to know more or get involved in CC’s open culture program? Reach out: info@creativecommons.org 

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2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy, Infrastructure, Capacity building, and Community engagement. 

Policy 

Engaging with UNESCO to promote open culture in the framework of MONDIACULT 2022, we hosted UNESCO ResiliArt x Mondiacult – From Access to Culture to Contemporary Creativity in February and heard from artists, creators, and curators about how open access is an essential ingredient for vibrant cultural life. In September, we delivered the keynote at Digitalizar en común: formas distribuidas de propiedad y autoría culturales organized by CC México — you can watch the recording on Facebook — and called participants to MONDIACULT 2022 to support better sharing of cultural heritage. We welcomed the Mexico City Declaration for Culture, declaring culture a global public good, and celebrated UNESCO’s Memory of the World’s 30th anniversary.

Members of the open culture community from both the CC copyright platform and the CC open culture platform alongside global supporters co-drafted the policy paper Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform, published in April, to serve as a reference point for the community’s advocacy work in copyright reform in the cultural heritage context. It is available in 6 languages, and more translations are coming. The paper was the basis for discussion during a virtual workshop in May, which paved the way for the development of a guide for policymakers Towards better sharing of cultural heritage — A Creative Commons Call to Action to Policymakers, released in December. We will be presenting the guide at Open Nederland’s Public Domain Day on January 13, 2023, among other events.  

We also pushed for better exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage in international copyright law at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) in May, and expressed our views on Italy’s national cultural heritage digitization plan, which found an echo in our joint statement with Communia for protecting the public domain in the case opposing the Uffizi gallery in Florence to French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier.  

Infrastructure

On Public Domain Day, January 1, 2022, we launched the CC Public Domain Tools in GLAMs – Needs Assessment to probe needs around CC tools in the cultural heritage sector, notably galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). A survey was shared in English, French and Spanish, and gathered 133 responses from 43 countries on five continents. We are currently processing the data and will soon publish a report and roadmap for future action. Watch this space! 

Capacity building

January marked the launch of the first Open Culture/GLAM Certificate cohort of 20 participants from six countries. And in February, CC made scholarships available for the June and September Certificate courses. The scholarships enabled participants from eight countries to take the June Certificate alone — including colleagues from Open Future, Wikimedia Italy, University of Leeds, the Wasila Museum, and other academic and research institutions. Thinking about enrolling in our next CC Certificate cohort? Check out this interview with Revekka Kefalea, a graduate of the CC Certificate for GLAM, and read what people say about CC Certificate courses. 

You can register for a 2023 course for open Culture/GLAM. To access a 60% scholarship for a Certificate for Open Culture/GLAM course, simply (1) select a Certificate for “Open Culture” course from the 2023 list of courses. When registering for a course: (2) Select the option to “add promo code” and type in: Y2GLAMSCHOLAR60%. That will provide you with a 60% discount on registration, while tickets last. Note: there are no refunds on scholarship tickets.  

We also offer on-demand training and consulting services. Reach out (info@creativecommons.org) to find out more.

Community engagement 

Throughout the year, we facilitated the Open Culture Platform, a space for heritage professionals and open advocates to share resources. We held monthly calls and organized several collaboration opportunities, including six working groups tackling emerging issues, such as traditional knowledge and copyright, heritage materials from community-driven initiatives, contemporary archiving of cultural heritage, “attribution” models for public domain materials, a glossary and bibliography of open culture, and the ethics of open sharing. Interested in joining the platform? Read a few members’ experiences of taking part in platform activities, and become a member yourself! Keep an eye out for the working groups’ reports and webinar recordings, coming soon on CC’s Medium. 

In January, we launched CC Open Culture VOICES, a multilingual series of 35 short interviews with dozens of distinguished experts from around the world — historians, researchers, activists, curators, professors, and many others — which engaged 3 million people across multiple platforms. Stay tuned for Season 2, a whole series of new episodes to be released in the coming months! 

We also published eight community case studies, which show some of the opportunities, challenges, and needs of low-capacity and non-Western cultural heritage institutions. This helped us discover diverse and inclusive avenues of engagement with the global community, as well as generate a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture and understanding of open culture. 

On Valentine’s Day, February 14, we launched the Open Culture Remix Art Contest calling on artists to remix public domain or openly licensed works from open GLAM collections. Not only did this showcase contemporary creativity, it also canvassed the importance of CC’s infrastructure for the dissemination and revitalization of culture. Take a look at the 1st place winner’s work:  

In July, we published a comprehensive report on the Barriers to Open Culture, which lays out the legal, financial, resource, and technical barriers faced by institutions wishing to open their collections. We looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’s Barriers to Open Access, and analyzed our VOICES interviews for a wide range of insights, coming up with Money, People and Policy as the three main barriers. In 2023, we aspire to develop a report on the Benefits of Open Culture. 

We have lots of other plans for 2023 and can’t wait to start a new chapter of CC’s Open Culture program. Want to stay informed and participate? Make sure to join our Open Culture Platform and sign up to our mailing list. You can also visit the CC Blog for more on open culture news (we hosted and attended numerous webinars, expert talks, panel discussions and community gatherings, check them out) and subscribe to the CC Newsletter for CC-wide updates. You can also go back in time and listen to a presentation of the open culture program on the podcast Open Minds… from Creative Commons, giving an overview of activities in February 2022.

 

Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at info@creativecommons.org. 

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Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2023. As of January 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works has become as free as the moon and the stars — at least in the USA and many other countries. And what better way to get us feeling inspired than recalling those timeless lyrics of the 1927 hit musical composition: “The Best Things In Life Are Free“. We agree! That’s why we made it our theme. 

This year ushered in a wealth of creative works published in 1927 into the Public Domain, which now contribute to our cultural heritage. Iconic authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, silent film classics like the controversial The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson and Fritz Lang’s dystopian Metropolis, and snappy musical compositions like “You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream”.

You can welcome new public domain works and celebrate with us in three ways:

1. Join us for a virtual party on 19 January 2023 at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 9pm UTC, where we will celebrate our theme, The Best Things In Life Are Free, with a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the open world, including additional sponsoring organizations Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT! 
2. The Internet Archive will also host an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on 20 January 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco. We will celebrate 1927 as the founding year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while watching this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries, eating popcorn and ice cream. Come dressed in your best golden age of Hollywood inspired costume, and walk the red carpet with the Internet Archive as we celebrate the entry of “talkies” into the public domain. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO! 
3. Celebrate Public Domain Day 2023 with the Internet Archive through creative expression! Artists of all levels are invited to submit short films 2-3 minutes in length crafted from  resources from the Internet Archive’s collections from 1927. The uploaded videos will be judged and prizes of up to $1500 awarded. All submissions must be in by Midnight, 16 January 2023 (PST). SUBMIT AN ENTRY OR FIND OUT MORE!

The post Celebrate Public Domain Day 2023 with Us: The Best Things in Life Are Free appeared first on Creative Commons.

The CC Certificate program offers training covering open licensing and the ethos of sharing. All CC Certificate content is openly licensed and built with the intention of adaptation and remix. While CC currently offers Certificate courses to address (1) educators, (2) academic librarians, and (3) cultural heritage communities (also known as GLAM: galleries, libraries, archives and museums), everyone is welcome. We seek opportunities to share and adapt the course content for different cultures, languages and countries — leveraging its Creative Commons Attribution licensing (CC BY). The more audiences for whom the content resonates, the greater the impact of our open licensing training.

Creative Commons proudly presents the latest translations of the CC Certificate course content. Thanks to the translation efforts of CC Certificate graduates and additional translators below, a total of 569 million people will have access to the educational resources in their native languages. These published works enable 493 million native Spanish speakers and 76 million native French speakers to access translations in their languages — not to mention others who have Spanish or French as a second language.

Nicolas Simon offered the first iteration of our French translation. Nicolas Simon is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology, and Social Work at Eastern Connecticut State University. He graduated from the CC Certificate for Educators course in 2022.

 

 

The following individuals engaged in a two-week “translation sprint” using open source software, built for translations:

Carlos E. Ferrero is an ATA certified English into Spanish translator. He was a financial analyst for La Banque Française et Italienne pour L’Amérique du Sud in Caracas and the Citizens & Southern National Bank in Atlanta, GA.

 

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Emma Miliani is Linguistics Full Professor at Carabobo University, Valencia Venezuela. (Now retired). Milani taught English and Spanish at  Università della Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy, after leaving Venezuela.

 

 

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Hector Teran Torres (also known as Hecter) is a Professor in the Engineering Faculty at Simon Bolivar University, Colombia.  He is passionate about the SDGs and Creative Commons. He likes to share knowledge, teach computer science, volunteer, inspire his students and ride his bike.  Hector was part of the inaugural CC Certificate BETA class for Educators, and graduated in 2019.

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Talia Méndez Mahecha (also known as Tata) is a digital creative. She is a PhD student at Western University studying Media Studies. Her experience includes consulting for libraries, museums, and historical memory projects, including the National Library of Colombia and the Colombian Truth Commission. Currently, she serves as research assistant to the projects “Surviving Memory in Post War El Salvador” and “Google Arts & Culture – Assessment of Collection”. Tata graduated from the CC Certificate for Open Culture / GLAM (Galeries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in 2022.

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Jackeline Bucio currently serves as Deputy Director in the Online high school & MOOC area at the Open University, Educational Innovation and Distance Education Department (CUAIEED), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She also works actively in the use of Wikipedia in educational contexts (WMMX).  Jackeline graduated from the CC Certificate for Educators in 2022. 

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Carlos Ferrero, Emma Miliani and Hector Teran Torres revised the drafted translation following the sprint, providing the final version. 

Both translations are available on the CC Certificate website. Initial complete translations like these are the first step in making Certificate materials useful for more people. While Creative Commons does not vet translations or update them with our annual content updates, we are proud to share these big first steps to localize the core CC Certificate content. We celebrate having the CC Certificate materials now available in nine languages: Arabic, Burmese, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Yoruba!

Want to get involved? 

If you are interested in translating CC Certificate content in a different language or creating an audio version of the content in 2023, please be in touch. We have some funding for translation work in 2023, and hope to work with you.

We also look forward to working with Nicolas Simon and other native French speakers on a revision process for the French translation in 2023, to ensure the translation is useful to a range of French speaking communities beyond France. Please contact jennryn@creativecommons.org if you are interested in either of these opportunities.

The post Creative Commons (CC) Certificate: available in French and Spanish! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last Friday (16 December 2022), Creative Commons proudly celebrated twenty years of CC licensing and all the groundbreaking collaboration it has enabled. As we look back on this remarkable journey, time seems to pass more quickly than ever — yet our gratitude for each milestone remains unwavering, as do words of thanks towards everyone who helped make it possible.

The team, network, and community of Creative Commons have so much to be proud of in 2022. We celebrated our 20th anniversary with community events around the world and an in-person party in San Francisco. In these two decades, CC revolutionized the copyright landscape, creating an open access alternative to traditional “all rights reserved” restrictions. Today, this system continues to empower a new era of online sharing and collaboration that has transformed our global digital landscape. Now two and a half billion pieces of content have been freed up because our open licenses and public domain tools empower creators, researchers, librarians, archivists, musicians, artists, educators, students, and individuals globally to share content openly. We are so proud of our key relationships, where our licenses are used every second to share knowledge and culture on platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr. And now in new spaces, we saw our public domain tools celebrating the #CC0Summer in 2022, where NFT artists used our licenses to place their creations in the commons.

CC has made a dramatic new commitment to tackling the climate crisis this year. We’ve taken an ambitious leap forward by launching our Open Climate Campaign in partnership with EIFL and SPARC, turning open sharing of research outputs into a cornerstone of climate science. Huge thank you goes to the Open Society Foundations, whose initial seed funding led to a four-year funding award from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. CC has a huge role to play in opening up knowledge that can help solve humanity’s greatest challenge. We were thrilled to receive a further one million dollars by the McGovern Foundation to expand our efforts and do more in 2023 to open large climate data sets. We are currently recruiting for an Open Climate Data Manager. Please do come and join our team at CC if you too want to play your part in solving the world’s greatest challenge.

We were also one of the seven organizing partners who joined forces to launch the Movement for a Better Internet, a diverse community of advocates, activists, academics, and civil society groups working together to promote policies that create a better internet for people everywhere. We’ve made a great start in our mission to build an inspiring movement — with 60 committed partners and the launch of an acclaimed hub in October. The internet is at an inflection point, with many people and organizations prioritizing public interest values over eyeballs, attention and profit. With the Musk-led takeover of Twitter, the new Online Harms Bill in UK Parliament, upcoming implementation of the EU’s DMA and DSA, as well as potential Supreme Court rulings on Section 230 set for 2023 — there is certainly a lot to do. We were delighted to join both the Unfinished Network and the UN Global Goals Week Coalition, and were proud to be chosen as a Morgridge Family Foundation organization for the fellow/mentor programme.

CC has been following the crucial debates on data and AI in the EU as policy becomes law and where better sharing, our strategic theme, came under scrutiny. We have written more on data and AI than we had ever planned for, because there is just so much to reflect on and be challenged by. We must continue to pursue these policy areas into 2023, particularly giving a global perspective, so that our strategic theme of better sharing may continue and prosper. Our tireless commitment and passion for Open Education in 2022 positioned us to further the CC mission of leveraging open licenses, open access policies, and open education opportunities. Our Open Education Platform community made a lasting impression with two rounds of electrifying Lightning Talks. Their seven-minute presentations were full of inspiring stories and the latest updates in open education!

Another highlight was partnering with Fine Acts to commission the #BetterSharing collection of illustrations, inspired by quotes about Better Sharing from 12 prominent global open advocates. These CC-licensed visual pieces were created by 12 internationally renowned artists and shared on TheGreats.co, an open repository of free illustrations focused on social justice issues.

Our CC Copyright Platform continues to highlight the global nature of the continuing copyright challenge, and our Open Culture program is going from strength to strength. A key highlight this year was launching our Open Voices series, featuring distinguished global cultural heritage professionals, which engaged 3 million people across multiple platforms. We hosted and attended numerous webinars, expert talks, panel discussions & community gatherings. Additionally, we released eight case studies that demonstrated the opportunities available for underrepresented & marginalized organizations, while our policy paper on copyright reform provided a roadmap towards better sharing of culture resources around the world.

This year saw our Open Journalism program pilot launch to great success — culminating in a global report on the state of journalism that uncovered the struggles of combating misinformation and bridging the divide between press and public. We look forward to expanding our work in Open Journalism in 2023.  This seems timely, as 2024 is set to be the year of elections across the world, from India to the US, the EU to Mexico, Indonesia to the UK and many more. If we want to uphold global democracy, supporting quality journalism has never been so important.  

However, like all our programmatic work, none of this would happen if it were not for the licenses. I hope in 2023 we will be able to secure dedicated funding to support our license infrastructure, because in supporting our licenses, all other open projects are supported, from publicly funded scientific research to all Wikipedia pages. Without CC, you could not share in the same way globally — something we need to be more intentional about in 2023 — sharing our intrinsic value and promoting the organization in new places and spaces. If we join forces and prioritize better sharing in the public interest, we can make great strides in tackling the most pressing issues of our time. Our value is everywhere, and it is our responsibility to advance CC’s impact and promote our work to a new generation of open knowledge enthusiasts and advocates.

In 2022, we met our 20th Anniversary fundraising goal, we launched two new programs, and were involved in policy deliberations at the EU in a way we have never been before. Our signature Open Culture program continued to make great strides in the global cultural heritage space. In 2023, we want to build on this success with our first in-person CC Global Summit in 4 years, which will be held in Mexico City the first week of October. This landmark event will explore emerging technologies and CC’s role in creating a more open world where everyone can thrive. Enjoy the holiday season, and wishing you all the best for 2023.

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The post CC at 20: CEO Catherine Stihler Reflects on 2022 and Where CC Is Headed Next appeared first on Creative Commons.