Creating content guides for your project

Here are a few examples of resources created by Curatescape users: Content Creation Guide | Curatescape.

The Cleveland Historical project also uses a public contribution submission guide:

Historical MX, a Curatescape project based at Sam Houston State University, has developed the following contributor guide:

@jmarksouther Have you considered using a Creative Commons Attribution license for your quick guide to creating content? I think it would be fun to collaborate on creating a more generic, openly licensed guide that any Curatescape project could use as a starting place for making their own resource for contributors.

I haven’t, but I would be open to that. To date I’ve only shared photos (on Flickr) on a CC basis (using BY-NC-SA). Would you recommend the same license in this case? My assumption is that using a simpler BY-NC license would obviate the need to indicate where changes were made. Full story: I adapted this guide with only modest changes (with attribution) from a student guide that @aaronbcowan shared with me, but Aaron is quick to point out that he created his guide from an earlier one I shared. Anyway, the larger point is that, yes, I think it’s in the interest of everyone in the Curatescape community to do whatever encourages collaborative creation.

I’ve actually switched to using the very liberal Creative Commons Zero license on my photos for Baltimore Heritage and a simple Creative Commons Attribution license for Explore Baltimore Heritage and most of our other writing projects.

Non-commercial restrictions on Creative Commons licenses can be tricky to interpret – and I honestly don’t think there is a big risk of people incorporating our work into commercial products (other than the occasional news article). On this, I’m following the lead from Wikipedia and other open projects that discourage the use of NC Creative Commons licenses – here are a couple links that may be helpful in explaining the issue: