Creative Commons license for some NZETC content

We’ve just updated the NZETC website to use a Creative Commons license for those digitised works where the original is now out of copyright. There are now 433 individual titles available under the New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-CA) license including Walter Buller’s “A History of the Birds of New Zealand”, the 1914 edition of the Edmond’s Cookery Book, Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, Elsdon Best’s monographs, and the many 19th century New Zealand novels.

We hope this will encourage more use of the resources by making it obvious to our users that in many cases they can take the digital editions to share and transform as they like (as long as the attribution and share-alike conditions are met).

Of course much of the material in the NZETC collection remains in copyright to the original author and/or publisher. For those texts we have retained a conditions of use statement which advises users that they must seek explicit permission to re-use the digitised material.

The information as to which conditions apply to a given text will appear in the left sidebar. If you go to a digitised text at the moment and don’t see the license information you might just need to force the page to refresh as the old copies of the pages will still be sitting in our cache.

We look forward to seeing what creative uses people put the material to ….