Creativity in a modern age, The Creative Commons

The internet has created many opportunities for communication and informational exchanged. One of the great products of the internet age is the Creative Commons project. This non-profit organization allows users to access many forms of media, and remix and reuse previous works in their own art, legally. From reading a bit about this project, it seems like a great idea, promoting creativity and the arts while allowing artists and creators to be unhindered by legal matters. Also, from looking at the Creative Common's website, apparently Al Jazeera and the White House both support and contribute artwork and materials to the Creative Commons.

For our purposes at Digital Initiatives at Ohio University's Alden library, Creative Commons can be used to promote our collections! Although the library already supports the Creative Commons, we should promote the use of the Creative Commons and our own collections simultaneously. Our first step in promoting our collections via Creative Commons is to give more public access to our more interesting photo/document collections, and promote the creative possibilities of these images. The second step would be to secure the legal matters surrounding the images, which could be solved by using Creative Commons to allow the use of these images. In a practical step, we could advertise the remixing of archival images, possibly by creating a poster with images with our collections and suggesting that people visit our website and use the images in their artwork. The photo below is a good example of what could be promoted and reused by artists:

Using photos like this and promoting their use will gain more attention for our website, along with promoting creativity for those in our school.