This blog post was written by Chris Woolfrey, Editor of Right to Copy. You can fund Right to Copy on Kickstarter.

In 2007 the novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote “The Ecstasy of Influence” for Harper’s Magazine. In it, Lethem argues that all art by necessity connects with other art: that open lines of communication are built into the creative process and into artworks themselves.

In other words, that an artist can’t help but connect his or her work to existing things, and at the same time lay the ground for others to connect with his or her own. Discussing the connection of ideas across hundreds of years, he writes:

… consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

In so writing, Lethem put eloquently something I had for a long time felt but couldn’t articulate: that sharing ideas and drawing on the ideas of others isn’t always an ideological choice. It happens without us even thinking about it.

That was the impetus for creating Right to Copy, a magazine discussing the relationship between copyright and art, and promoting a belief in the open communication of ideas. My thinking was this: if Lethem is right (and I believe that he is), then why is it that we close artworks off with stringent copyright laws?

For me, doing so only makes it harder for people to do what they’re doing without even meaning to: creating something – from music and film to writing, painting, video games and fashion – that naturally affects everything around it.

Though I’m probably in favour of some form of copyright law, I agree with Lawrence Lessig and the like that the current system is broken and wildly out of control. I won’t repeat those arguments here, because they’ve been better made by others – including Cory Doctorow, in Right to Copy’s first issue – but it’s clear to me that something should change, and that artists and their audiences should be talking about it.

Right to Copy will provide a forum for that discussion, and it will make clear that the discussion doesn’t begin and end with the law. Indeed, it will argue that how the law permeates in popular culture is much more important.

To that end, it’ll look at what an author is, and why we think authors are important; it’ll consider why originality is such a sought after thing, and how far it can really be achieved; and it’ll wonder why the kinds of discussions orchestrated by
Open Knowledge International happen in certain fields – data, software, publishing itself – but not so much in the arts and the way we discuss the arts.

And they need to happen in the arts. Mass media have always had a community element to them; it’s imperative that we not only protect that but strengthen and extend it. It’s my hope that, in publishing a magazine under an open copyright license – and more importantly, discussing issues and concepts that really matter to people – I can help in my small way to spread the word, and to bring others into the conversation and therefore empower them.  

It might be grandiose and it might not work: but if there’s an audience for the magazine then it means that there might be an audience for a different kind of art. In that sense, Right to Copy is a case study; and one that is gathering support already.

 

This is a guest blog post by Kelly Fitzpatrick on Open Marginalis: a selection of digitized medieval manuscripts accessible under open use terms working to guide new users to open collections for casual and scholarly use (Open Marginalis, About).

Starting work on Open Marginalis, I wanted to solve a discovery problem. Institutions are choosing to make digital collections accessible under open use terms, but finding where to start can be tough for users at all levels, and knowing how to use that content can be even harder.

In action, Open Marginalis grew to function as selection of open collection highlights sourced from online resources within the scope of digitized medieval manuscripts. In this framework, the primary goal is to identify and feature selected content from open collections and aggregates like Wikimedia Commons, and share that work with the objective of highlighting open content produced by institutions – driving users back to collections through an accessible platform, and always linking back to source.

While earning my MLIS, I was interested in learning more about platforms for digital scholarship, and how those platforms can be used to boost collection access. In the final year of my MLIS, I had the opportunity to present Open Marginalis at the 2015 Simmons College Graduate Symposium as a work-in-progress under the title Open Marginalis: Medieval Marginalia in Open Access.  In the same year, I produced an overview of project goals, operations, and applied practices in OpenMarginalis: Tumblr as Platform for Digital Scholarship in Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections. In this piece, I wanted to both share applied practices for creating and growing with digital projects, and explore popular platforms like Tumblr as a place for digital scholarship.

For this project, I chose Tumblr as a platform that would support users at all levels of scholarship, while being able to reach the strong community of information institutions maintaining a presence on the platform. After years of learning more about Tumblr’s functionality as a casual user, I wanted to see how a platform that empowers users to curate information could be used as a tool for digital collections. Continuing work on Open Marginalis, I want to create a space where users can start their search – from someone looking for a place to begin their experience with digital collections in a familiar interface, to a seasoned researcher looking for something new to include in a publication that they’d like to share under open use terms. As the growing audience of Open Marginalis quickly approaches 5000 followers through Tumblr, I want to learn more about how online audiences are using Open Marginalis, and what they’d like to see more of in the future.

As a growing digital project, being able to take shape in tandem with project goals has been key to where Open Marginalis has moved since it’s start date. In the past six months, I made the decision to widen the scope of Open Marginalis from a project focusing more granularly marginalia shown in digitized medieval manuscripts, to digitized medieval manuscripts as a whole. While project goals have remained consistent, I’ve continued to experiment with different ways Open Marginalis can better improve access within its scope. For example, in late 2015, I put together a Browse by Institution page with the goal of enabling users to browse content by their source institution for a different discovery experience. More recently, I’ve started work on a Resources page for Open Marginalis with plans for future expansion – currently featuring a set of scope specific Wikimedia categories, from “Illuminated Manuscripts by Century” to “Illuminated Manuscripts by Style” as an accessible entry point for more open resources.

In future developments for Open Marginalis, I want to continue working on new approaches to supporting the visibility of digital collections, bolstering existing resources for growing audiences, and sharing applied practices from this digital project with more to come.

(Image: The British Library, Public Domain)

 

New York is a center for world-class cultural heritage institutions, a site of innovation in the realm of digital humanities, library, archival, museum technology, and information sharing, not to mention hefty content production.  New York was also home to the first U.S. Wikimedia Chapter, Wikimedia NYC. That’s why it’s not surprising that there is also a wealth of recent Open Access initiatives in the New York Area: in this post you can find a select list.  

 

Content Donations

New York Public Library (NYPL Labs) – In March, 2014 the New York Public Library, Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division announced that they were to release over 20,000 high resolution images of cartographic works in their collections as well as crowd sourced transcriptions, that were known to have no U.S. copyright restrictions. The Division released these images under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (U.N. OCHA) – As part of its activities U.N. OCHA  creates fully up-to-date general reference maps of nations, specifically to facilitate emergency responding. Since Spring 2014, U.N. OCHA and Wikimedia NYC have collaborated to upload approximately 226 coordinates-based maps to Wikimedia Commons and begun adding these maps images to their respective Wikipedia articles.

Józef Piłsudski Institute of America – The Józef Piłsudski Institute of America, a cultural heritage institution grown out of the collection of the Polish Chief of State and WWI military leader, has donated over 1,400 images to Wikimedia Commons. The images include photographs and scans of military documents, letters, and other Polish and Ukrainian governmental documents.

Other – Many New York Institutions have contributed small batches of images to Wikimedia Commons under CC0 licenses, as part of Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons and GLAM projects. These institutions include the Frick Art Reference Library, the Center for Jewish History, and the Queens Borough Public Library.

Open Cultural Data

Linked Jazz – Initiated by the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and funded by the OCLC Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) in 2011, this project aims to link cultural heritage materials in a web of connections using Linked Open Data (LOD) technology. The project includes multiple facets, including an exportable, LOD Linked Jazz API, a network visualization tool, and an interactive, exploratory search function.

Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum – In early 2012, the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum released its object record collection metadata API under a Creative Commons license and through GitHub.

 

Wikipedia

Wikipedia Regional Edit-a-thons – Over 10 collaboratively organized Wikipedia Edit-a-thons in New York have taken place since September, 2013 with many more staff training events and social free culture meetups. These have included: A Wikipedia Edit-a-thon and Photo-hunt with a theme of “Brooklyn History” at Brooklyn Public Library, an Edit-a-thon a #GWWI (Global Women’s Wikipedia Write- In) on Women’s History at Columbia University’s Butler Library, and Edit-a-thons at Public Libraries in Harlem, Westchester, Queens, and Greenwich Village, among other places.

WikiConference USA – The U.S.’s first Wikimedia Conference also took place on May 30 – June 1st at New York Law School, and was hosted by Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia D.C. and funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation and gifts from Consumer Reports, the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, and the City University of New York. This event, which drew approximately 250 participants, included a 2-day program of workshops and keynotes and a 1-day unconference.

Wikipedia Education Program – The Wikipedia Education Program in New York has been growing from one class in Fall 2010 to at least 10 courses with a Wikipedia component and Wikipedia Education Program ambassadors in Fall 2014. This semester’s program includes a course on the Economics of Developing Countries at Manhattanville College, a course on Women and Health at Barnard College, a sociology of fashion course at FIT, and a Development Psychology class at Hunter College that is simultaneously being run as a study on the pedagogical effectiveness of Wikipedia. There are also two English courses at LaGuardia Community College focused on Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

 

Wikipedians-in-Residence

Several Wikipedians-in-Residence call New York their home.

• Lane Raspberry has been a Wikipedian-in-Residence, at Consumer Reports in Yonkers, New York since April 2012.
• David Goodman has serves as Wikipedian-in-Residence  at New York Public Library of the Performing Arts Music Division.
• The Józef Piłsudski Institute of America has hosted three University students of Polish History as Wikipedians-in-Residence in the past year: Piotr Puchalski, Łukasz Chełmski, and Adam Granatowski.
• Dorothy Howard (article author) continues to serve as Wikipedia at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, where she started in August, 2014.

 

Free Culture Groups

Many formal and informal free culture groups and meetups operate simultaneously in New York. Named here are few of many:

Techno Activism First Mondays is a workshop and discussion-based meetup group. It has hosted recent events including: “Muslims & Surveillance in NYC: The Next Steps,” in June and “LGBTQ Surveillance & Censorship: Understanding the Worldwide Challenges” in July.

The Internet Society of New York organizes projects and events around the themes of privacy and surveillance, internet access, net neutrality, elections, decentralized networks.