Introduction
Trying a new item for The CerebralRift, yet again. This time I am taking a shot at writing a few news pieces. The idea is to highlight events, announcements, and other stories that might be of interest to those who follow the changes the Creative Commons is bringing to the world. This is Commons Notable News!
New Project Seeks Humanities eBooks
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced that they are starting a grant program to encourage publishers to bring outstanding out-of-print humanities works back to the public as freely accessible eBooks released under a Creative Commons license.
The new program is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ The Common Good: Humanities in the Public Square initiative which seeks to demonstrate the significance of the humanities, and humanities scholarship in public life.
According to the press, the Humanities Open Book program:
Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.
Personally, this sounds like a winning project to me. There are a lot of older works that are in the public domain that have been made available by Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Any program that seeks to expand the number of works available is a welcome addition to base of materials that are currently available.
80K More Items In The Public Domain
It seems like I come across a lot of these collections. Many of the vary in terms of quality, organization, and variety. The thing that sets this collection apart is how well it has been curated. The Public Domain Project is trying to solve the problem of some of this organization.
Recently launched on Pond5 the Public Domain Project appears to be one of the nicer ways to search or browse through a large collection of free materials. If you don’t like trying to wade through The Internet Archive, MusOpen, or Flickr’s Commons site, this might be one of the best alternatives available.
CC Affiliates Mixtape
While I normally save music releases for my reviews, this is a collection that caught my attention and I wanted to get out to my readers more quickly than it will get through my over-stuffed review queue.
CC-Europe has put together a compilation of twenty-five pieces from around the world, spanning four continents. This collection follows in the tradition of the 2012 CC10 Mixtape, which originally was released to mark the 10th anniversary of the Creative Commons.
The music in this mixtape ranges widely in style: classical, jazz, pop, African, hip-hop, folk, electronic, indie, morna, reggae, acid, ambient, and dance to name some of the styles. It’s really a cool compilation. Check it out on SoundCloud at the link above.
Conclusion
Well, there you have it: three notable projects that grabbed my attention from the news.
If you have any news stories that you would like me to consider for future editions of Commons Notable News, please drop me a note using the Contact Form.
