Guidance and Training for School Admin Teams FINDING AND ATTRIBUTING OPENLY LICENSED RESOURCES

WHY IS OPENLY LICENSED CONTENT IMPORTANT FOR ME? Our school has adopted an OER policy. That means that all staff have the RIGHT to freely share the resources they create in their work, and the RESPONSIBILITY to use content in a fair way that attributes the sources of content they use. As the admin team in the school, you are at the forefront of this work- Letters Website Signage All is outward facing. You have the very important duty of representing our commitment to fair use to the general public. Openly licensing is about credit and celebrating your work! You will be named in the license for any work you produce and openly license.

HOW DO I FIND OPENLY LICENSED RESOURCES? Finding OER is easy. The Creative Commons logo shows that more flexible permissions have been provided to use and reuse content. The public domain logo indicates that resources are available, free from any restrictions. You can find Creative Commons licensed content using special search functions of search engines and websites. For example, the familiar Google search has an ‘advanced search’ that lets you search by ‘usage rights’ for content shared under an open licence:

In your first search, which image would you have probably selected? Are there any problems you can see with that image with regards to copyright? In your second search, which image would you probably select? What are the advantages of selecting that image over search 1? Are there any disadvantages? What other search engines do you know that help find images? Have a look at how to perform an advanced search that filters by license on those search engines. Imagine that a member of staff has asked you to put a post on the school website about netball practice. You need an image to go with the post. Use google as your search engine. Perform two searches using ‘netball’ as your key word- first a general search, then an advanced search that filters the images for reuse with modification. PRACTISING FINDING OPENLY LICENSED IMAGES

ONCE I FIND AN IMAGE, WHAT DO I DO NEXT? An important part of Open Licensing is ATTRIBUTION. This means giving a reference to where you found your image. When using any Creative Commons content, you always need to attribute your sources. The Creative Commons attribution requirement is about acknowledging your sources fairly. Sometimes the creators specify how they would like to be attributed, but a lot of the time the creators of a work don’t say how they want to be attributed. In that case, simply include: the title of the work; if the resource is hosted online, the web address (URL) where you found the work the creator of the work; the Creative Commons licence under which the work is available (together with the URL for the licence). There is no standard format for putting together an attribution, so you can rearrange the elements as you see fit, so long as all the information is included.

SO, OUR NETBALL IMAGE ON THE WEBSITE… …would have an attribution that looked like this: "Netball" by Liveste Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - If you use the image in a document, you need to include the above text, either where you use the image, or at the end of your document. For a presentation, you would acknowledge the image at the end of the presentation (e.g. on the final slide). If you were using the image in a movie, you would acknowledge it in the credits at the end of the movie. If you create a new image from the original (for example, by colouring it in), you cannot attribute by adding text, so you would use the ‘metadata’ function within the software used to create the image. On a website, you can credit the image with a small textbox under the image, a small italicised note at the end of the post or a clever hyperlink that provides the attribution without disrupting the visual layout of the webpage. Usually this is done by hyperlinking a cc-by symbol at the side of the image.

Acknowledgement: This document builds upon and adapts the work of OER Guidance for Schools (2014), by Björn Haßler, Helen Neo and Josie Fraser. Published by Leicester City Council, available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The following images were included without adaptation: "Netball" by Liveste Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - Finding and Attributing Openly Licensed Resources : Guidance and Training for School Admin Teams (2015), by N Ward, St. Paul’s Catholic School, Leicester, available under CC-By 4.0