Mike Ellis, a social web specialist based in the UK, posted an excellent presentation on why setting your content free is a good thing. You can read the presentation here.

The last two months has been a busy time for the web development team. One of the projects has been the redevelopment of the NZMuseums website. McGovern Online have updated the branding of the site and this has flowed through to all pages. The home page has also had a major overhaul.

The changes include a new interactive map to find museums, display of the latest tweets from the NZMuseum Twitter stream, latest tags on the home page, a search box in the header to allow searching from any page, and new RSS and Share buttons.

You can view the site at www.nzmuseums.co.nz.

Our latest upgrade includes rights management support. You can now set a default licence for your content and override the licence on any specific record and its images. The licences you can choose from include Creative Commons to promote sharing and re-use of content.

By default, all content has been set with a licence of ‘All rights reserved’. However, we’d love for organisations who hold the copyright to some or all of their content to choose less restrictive licences such as Creative Commons. Less restrictive licences allow for others to share and build upon the content. For example, some projects gather content into geographic or thematic repositories (such as the DigitalNZ repository for New Zealand cultural content), while others build new tools such as maps and timelines to browse the content. For social history collections of physical objects, you own the copyright to the cataloguing record and any photos you make of them. For other collections, particularly library and art collections, the copyright to the work may be held by someone else and you need to obtain permission from the copyright holder for use of the image on the web and assign a licence to the records that the copyright holder agrees with.

How it works

Account holders in eHive can set a default licence through Edit My Profile – Preferences and Data Access.

The default licence can be overridden on each individual record. There’s a new link when you’re logged in and are viewing a record: Update Copyright Licence. Here’s how it looks when updating the licence for an individual record.

There are a range of licences supported, from the least restrictive (No rights reserved), through various licences to encourage sharing (Creative Commons), up to the most restrictive (All rights reserved).

When anyone is viewing a record, they see a licence at the bottom of the page:

The link takes the visitor to details about the licence, with the Creative Commons licences linking through to the appropriate licence on creativecommons.org. The Creative Commons licences are sensitive to the country of the account holder, so if the museum is in Australia for example, the link is to the Australian version of the Creative Commons licence.

You can see an example of this on Commemorative Loving Cup record.

There is also a new option to enable or disable whether your public content can appear in searches on 3rd party sites. The rights licences and 3rd party search option are in anticipation of the programming interfaces we are currently building. At present there is no automated sharing of content, but this will opened up in the next few months. We putting these options in the system now so that account holders have plenty of time to set preferences they are comfortable with.

We’re working on new options to search for content by licence type to make it easy for users to find content they can re-use.

Other changes in this upgrade

The logged in home page now includes a new notices section. When there is a major change in eHive that we want to draw your attention to, a short description of the change will appear in the notices section at the top of the page. Each notice has dismiss and read more options.

This upgrade also includes changes to speed up page loading, with the next results page loaded in the background while you’re viewing the current page. We’ve also made some changes to support the NZMuseums website upgrade which will launch in June.

The National Philatelic Collection is a unique repository of philately and artworks relating to the design of Australian postage stamps. The collection presents the background story to stamp issues through items such as source photographs and artwork illustrating the development stages of the stamp design to printed proofs of the finished stamp.

The collection is a source of information not only to philatelists, but also to those interested in the history of graphic design and printing in Australia. It tells the story of events and personalities that shaped contemporary Australia, reflecting and documenting the development of national identity.

Go to Australia Post National Philatelic Collection »