Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

The data is released under an Attribution Non-Commercial Creative Commons license. This is good news for archaeologists and other interested parties to be able to reuse and share the data, and another step forward towards opening up data about our past.

Framework Archaeology also distribute a (Windows-based) free data viewer, which provides basic GIS functionality for viewing the Stansted and Heathrow Terminal 5 data. The installation process is simple – download the Free Viewer (as it is called) and run the installer. Then download the dataset, run the dataset installer, launch the software, and explore away…

For those that just want the raw Stansted data, the formats for download include csv, xml, gml, shp, data dictionary, photos (jpg), and sections (jpg).

The excavation data for Heathrow Terminal 5 was released by Framework Archaeology in a similar way last August.

Making data from such an important archaeological excavation is a great philosophical move, and I do hope that more organisations follow suit. The key will be to see what (if anything) people do with this data…

Jordan Hatcher, formerly a Research Associate at the AHRC Research Centre for studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, is leading a study into how open content licences are currently being used by cultural organisations in the UK. The study began in June, 2007 and is being funded by the Eduserv Foundation. Ed Barker of Eduserv is assisting with the work.

In the survey, it is asked if people are interested in a ‘toolkit’ being produced next year to help people understand these ‘new’ ways of licensing cultural heritage information. This is something I would love to see, as an advocate of Creative Commons.

It’s a shared cultural heritage that we have, and come what may, it’s our duty to share the information we have about it.

Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.

By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0″ license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!