Case Studies/Hood River County Library District
(c) by Hood River County Library District
Rather than having a restrictive “all rights reserved” mindset regarding copyright on its works, Hood River County Library District has adopted a Creative Commons Attribution license as the default for District-created content. This change makes Hood River's libraries the first in Oregon to provide such permissive copyright uses by default for most of its content. — Buzzy Nielsen, Library Director
Overview
Hood River County Library District in Oregon, United States, is a new library entity created in 2010 following the closure of the county-run library. As a new and independent governmental-entity, the District wants to get itself off on the right foot by encouraging people to copy, reuse, and remix the content it creates. It adopted a new | intellectual property policy that makes CC BY the default license for most District-produced content.
The policy was modeled off of that by the University of Michigan Library.
License Usage
The default for most District-produced content will be CC BY. This includes walkthrough documents for using library resources, reading lists, public presentations, training documents, and more. As a new library district, there is little content currently. However, as operations pick up, Hood River County Library District anticipates that several documents and presentations will be available to patrons, businesses, and other libraries to copy and reuse.
There are some restrictions to the license:
- The District's logo;
- Third-Party material that is being used under fair use or with permission (such as third-party electronic resources);
- Any photographs where patrons, staff, or Board members of the District are easily identifiable.
Motivations
The Board of Directors and Library Director of Hood River County Library District felt that, as a publicly-funded entity, it's important to encourage use of not only the libraries it runs, but the content it creates. By adopting CC BY, the District feels it is maximizing the taxpayers' money by sharing its content far and wide.
Impact
Since the District just opened its libraries' doors in July 2011, little content has been created. However, when it opens in full on December 2011, it anticipates several documents will be usable by the public and other libraries. Already, other libraries in the Sage Library System are using a walkthrough created by Hood River County Library District to help patrons use the self checkout stations of their open source integrated library system.
