The Distant Librarian

Under the Influence: Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing

One of the most well-written podcasts (oh, and I guess it's a radio show too) out there is Terry O'Reilly's Under The Influence. Terry tells stories of how marketing works (and sometimes doesn't), and it's always an entertaining and fascinating half-hour. His most recent episode, Season 11, episode 3, is Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing. If you want to listen online, the CBC site is probably best. If you want to subscribe to the podcast (and you should), that's now over here.

From the show notes,

This week, we look at the ways libraries market themselves. If you think libraries are quiet, you’ve got another thing coming. We’ll talk about a library video series that played like a TV cop show - and - we’ll look at library wars - when libraries battle each other on social media.

Very frustrating though that on none of the sites affiliated with this show do complete transcripts with links appear. :-( He mentions an epic twitter fight between the Toronto Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library that occurred when the Raptors were playing for the NBA championship against the Golden State Warriors, and he also details a bunch of innovative YouTube videos.

So I did some searching for you, and here are the relevant links:

• Twitter fight
• Kawhi's personalized library card
• Central Rappahannock Library's Libraries Will Survive video
• UMD "Gangnam Style" Parody 강남 스타일 (Official) video
• BYU Library Research Rescue videos
• NYPL Black Friday
• Johnson County Library Trucks
• Save Our Libraries campaign

Such good stuff!

 

 

Why you should pay attention to your Creative Commons licenses

I have never given a second thought to ensuring I've chosen the correct/most recent version of a creative commons license. That's changed, because I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's post, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator. In it, he outlines the emergence of the Copyleft troll, someone who posts images with an outdated CC license, and then sues people for using those images as they were intended to be used, but who may (or may not!) have neglected to completely comply by the letter of the license.

I don't know whether any of this would even apply to the textual works I would more likely post with a CC license, and maybe that doesn't matter because I'm not going to be going after anyone for using my works that may have an old license, but here at MPOW we're really starting to move to Open Educational Resources, and I could easily see the authors of such resources including images that are CC licensed earlier than 4.0 (or whatever the current version is by the time you read this). Going back to Cory's post, it seems that license version 2.0 is the really problematic one, but perhaps 1.0 and 2.5 are bad for the same or similar reasons? Please let me know if you know!

Does anyone know of a tool that allows me to search a specific site for content that has any creative commons license? So I'm looking for something like https://wordpress.org/openverse/ that includes something like Google's "site:" option. Bonus points if it could allow a search to be limited to content that applies a specific CC license! @researchbuzz? @cogdog?

Resources:

• Creative Commons FAQs
• Creative Commons version 4.0
• Creative Commons history of license versions

I love these quotes from Cory:

If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

If you send threats instead of requests for correction, you are a terrible person and you should feel really bad about yourself.

Stay safe, all, and do let me know if you have answers to any of my questions above!

 

5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Races Without Coding

One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They missed Tableau, though. Lots of fun choices!