Adding creative commons and free resources to library collections

Week before last on Uncontrolled Vocabulary, we (I use the term “we” loosely, since I lost microphone during the broadcast and could only chat) discussed Lawrence Lessig’s post about the Creative Commons licensing of his book “The Future of Ideas.” The question was, should librarians be making an effort to include creative commons licensed work in their catalog? I believe it was Julian who mentioned the possibility of copy cataloging, and this was a point I would have liked to hear more about. It seems like a huge wasted effort to have to re-catalog every CC licensed book out there.

Three examples:

Last semester I caught a nice glimpse of how published records can speed up the process of making the library catalog more friendly. Jim Shaw, government documents librarian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, demonstrated how he carefully reviews government documents for inclusion in the catalog. I, knowing little about cataloging, asked how long it takes to get the documents in the catalog, and he said the records are already available, so it is just a matter of downloading and tweaking.

When I took reference resources and services, the final project was to recommend new books for our library’s collection. I chose, as my topic, open source. This topic lends itself to creative commons licensed books, and, in fact, nearly everything I thought was worthwhile was also creative commons licensed. In some cases I recommended buying the book, and in some cases not- but it certainly seems like a good idea to include a link to the electronic version if it exists whenever you buy the book.

Today, at a staff meeting, we talked about getting our digital projects into the catalog, and therefore into worldcat. The problem with this is if people want to find the project through he public interface, how it lists is dependent on where you live (at least on Worldcat.org). For instance, if you are looking at the Willa Cather book “One of Ours” through worldcat.org, you won’t see the freely accessible online version at UNL unless you happen to be near UNL or a library that happened to catalog this digital edition of the book. Similarly, if you look for the Walt Whitman Archive in worldcat.org, the URL is not listed anywhere- you have to click through to a library record to get the URL. Is that useful? Could worldcat help call attention to these free resources by featuring them regardless of location?

What to do?

So, what if there were a source for creative commons books and online resources like there is for government documents? What might it look like? How would it work? It seems like there might already be a tool out there for this- Library Thing perhaps? Maybe there’s something already out there I don’t know about?

One of the things that constantly bugs me about creative commons work is how hard it is to find it. Few sites have gone as far as Flickr to make finding creative commons work easy to find and use. One thing we can all do is suggest to our favorite sites that they provide a way to license their work and create a way to search on that license.