Case Studies/New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
Untitled figure from B. L. Farjeon's Shadows on the Snow: A Christmas Story http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nz/
“We hope this will encourage more use of the resources by making it obvious to our users that, in many cases, they can take the digital editions to share and transform as they like.” — Alison Stevenson, NZETC director
Overview
The NZETC aims to create a digital library providing open access to significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials. This encompasses both digitised heritage material and born-digital resources; effectively partner with other organisations, as a collaborator and service provider, on a variety of digitisation and digital content projects; build a wider community skilled in the use and creation of digital materials through teaching and training activities and by publishing and presenting the results of research; To work at the intersection of computing tools with textual material and investigate how these tools may be used to make new knowledge from our cultural inheritance.
License Usage
The NZETC provides free access to a range of materials in multiple formats for download or online browsing. In situations where the original text is out of copyright, the NZETC provides a digitised version under a New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. This allows the sharing and remixing of the digitised text, even for commercial reasons, as long as the NZETC is credited and users licence their new creations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Licence too.
“We hope this will encourage more use of the resources by making it obvious to our users that, in many cases, they can take the digital editions to share and transform as they like.”
Alison Stevenson, NZETC director
So far there are 433 titles available under the New Zealand Creative Commons licence including Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand, the 1914 edition of the Edmond’s Cookery Book, Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, Elsdon Best’s monographs, and the many 19th century New Zealand novels in the archive.
Much of the material handled by the NZETC cannot be released with Creative Commons licences because full copyright is retained by others, although these parties will have the option of choosing CC for their work from now on.
Motivations
NZETC Director Alison Stevenson says that “in terms of CC licensing for original works which are in copyright, now that we can demonstrate the license in use on the site it will be easier to offer it as an option and we'll certainly talk to authors about this in future projects.” The centre regularly received requests from remix poets for permission to republish text, and from journalists and exhibition organisers for permission to reproduce NZETC images. By applying a Creative Commons licence to some of the collection, users no longer have to contact the centre for permission on this material. ..
Media
Text and image
