This past spring, Assistant Librarian of Access and Technical Services Beth South enrolled in the Creative Commons for Librarians certificate course with fellow librarian Peter Whiting from University of Southern Indiana and Instructional Designer Shannon Barnes from Earlham College. All three applied for a scholarship offered by Academic Libraries of Indiana’s (ALI) Affordable Learning Committee and the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) to participate in the rewarding experience.
The Creative Commons (CC) started as a non-profit in 2001, and by 2002, created a set of open licenses that allowed content creators and researchers world-wide to openly share their work with the public, proactively giving people the ability to use the works to further their own creative and educational pursuits within the terms of the creative commons license. This type of sharing promotes equitable access to information, creativity, and can allow others to build upon someone else’s work, continuing knowledge building that can contribute to the common good. The licenses created by the Creative Commons are meant to be accessible and adaptable world-wide, in turn supporting other global open movements, like Open Data, Open Science, and Open Culture.
The course content, which is freely available, provides a solid background in the history of Creative Commons, its impact on the global community, its relationship to copyright and other intellectual property laws, and how to properly use the licenses. There are several tracts of the program, one for librarians, one for educators, and one for GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). While the cost can be prohibitive at $500, it is worth paying to formally take the course if you have the chance.
By participating in the 10-week course, you get to interact with an engaged cohort of library professionals and educators and join a support network that can help you with questions or provide professional development tools as you work with openly licensed work or assist in educating others on open knowledge sharing. The structured class also encourages you to work through the assignments, which can be customized to support your professional work, helping you create the material that you can then use to educate others, and afterwards, you are awarded the CC certificate badge in Badgr (Canvas Badge system).
Our Access Services Librarian found the course to be extremely informative and fun, and now has material ready that she can pull from to host Creative Commons and Basic Copyright workshops at the IU East Campus Library. You can easily view and borrow for your own use the following:
- Creative Commons: The Short Story (Adobe Express video)
- Creative Commons Licenses By the Numbers (Google Slide presentation)
- Copyright for Beginners (Adobe Express slides)
- Very Basic Copyright: Student Edition (Canva Digital Zine)
- Open Access vs Open Educational Resources (PowerPoint presentation)
If you would like to know more about Open Access and Open Educational Resources, the Campus Library has the Open Access and OER at IU East libguide, which provides a list of open access and OER resources and tools. If you have any questions about the Creative Commons program or anything else related to this topic, you can contact Beth South at eabrockm@iu.edu.