Presentation from Digital Transformation: Supporting Culture Shift in Museums by Fred Saunderson, Intellectual Property Officer at the National Library of Scotland.

1. Building Bridges: Digital asset
licensing at the National Library of
Scotland
Fred Saunderson
National Library of Scotland
Presented to Digital Transformation: Supporting Culture Shift in Museums,
Museums Galleries Scotland, Glasgow, 27 March 2015

2. NOT a cliché
I really am going to talk about the
construction of bridges
…and the destruction of bridges

3. Building a bridge: Construction of the Forth Bridge, 1886-7, photograph by Philip Phillips.
Digital surrogate CC0 by National Library of Scotland, available on Wikimedia Commons
http://digital.nls.uk/74570334

4. Destruction of a bridge: Tay Bridge enquiry, 1879
Digital surrogate CC0 by National Library of Scotland, available on Wikimedia Commons
http://digital.nls.uk/74585092

5. 1. Why licensing
2. Our process
3. Lessons learned

6. 1. Licensing digital assets
• No consistent digital content licensing
• Ad hoc use of the CC-BY-NC-SA licence
• Two broadly competing interests:
– To widen access
– To generate income

7. • Licensing is crucial for both: What can you
do with this item?
• A licence like CC-BY-NC-SA is crucial for
income generation because of the ‘NC’
element, which provides the means to
monetise commercial use of the asset
• Equally, licences are essential for widening
access – all parts of the licence (CC, BY,
NC and SA) demonstrate how the asset
may be used. In other words ‘not all rights
are reserved’

8. 2. Our process
• We needed a single policy for licensing the
digital content (and metadata!) that we
create, particularly when there are no
underlying rights
• We wanted to stick with Creative
Commons licences – robust, known,
simple
• Several licensing options tabled internally
Q4 2013-14

9. • To address those two ‘competing’
interests, we opted for a mixed approach:
– Digital content would be split between
‘high’ quality and ‘low’ quality
– Low quality digital content, and
metadata, would be licensed with a
Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence
– High quality digital content would be
licensed with a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
licence
– There would be exceptions (e.g. third
party rights)

10. Low quality
digital conten
t
High quality
digital conten
t
Metadata CC0
CC-BY-NC-SA
Exceptions

11. • The Metadata and Digital Content
Licensing Policy was approved April 2014
• We began trial releases with ‘safe’ content
– no third party rights restrictions
• We (well, our Wikimedian Ally Crockford)
released about 1,000 images under a CC0
licence
• The Forth Bridge, the Tay Bridge, Scotia
Depicta, Jacobite Broadsides, etc.
• These went onto Wikimedia Commons

12. • As of February 2015, Commons images
from the Library are on 248 English
language Wikipedia pages + dozens more
non-English pages
• These pages were viewed a total of
1,216,063 times in February 2015
• Over the period May 2014-February 2015,
Wikipedia pages containing Library images
received 13,188,764 views
• We have uploaded only 1,000 images
Source: BaGLAMa 2, http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/baglama2/index.html#gid=157

14. Publication vs. distribution
Publication (proactiv
e, directly available t
o all)
Distribution (point to point,
reactive on request, suppli
ed for a specific use)

15. 3. Lessons learned
• Terminology can be a challenge (‘low’
quality v. ‘access’ quality)
• Content sizes can be a big challenge: what
is ‘low’/‘access’ quality? What should
people expect to be able to do with this
content?
• What is you business model? (e.g. income,
profit, cost recovery?)
• What are your costs?

16. • Back end systems
• Consistent licensing
http://digital.nls.uk/74570334

17. Fred Saunderson
National Library of Scotland
Except where otherwise stated this work by National Library of Scotland is licensed under
a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.