Review Pressbooks approach to built in attribution in the media library

[annezazu]

This is less of an enhancement and more of a suggestion around a currently used WordPress solution for attribution. This was discussed as part of the FSE Outreach Program's All Things Media effort:

Pressbooks is a WordPress based book publishing system built on WordPress Multisite. Pressbooks has included attribution built into the media library. Importantly, because they have done that, images are not only marked as creative commons visually, but also are marked in the code. https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/media/

You can see a demo of what this looks like starting here from the hallway hangout.

[zackkrida]

Great to see the pressbooks solution in action! I'd love to see some enhancements on top of that:

• A dropdown of licenses (perhaps the Creative Commons ones, because they're, well...common!) extensible by site owners via filter, rather than a plain text input
• Some other fields that may be inferred, or set globally:
  • Title of Work
  • Creator of Work
  • Link to Work
  • Link to Creator Profile
  • Year Of Creation

[beckej13820]

@zackkrida

In the Pressbooks solution, they have added what are asking for into the Media Library.

It's not immediately apparent, but in that setup, the license IS a dropdown menu when you click and select.

With Title, Creator, Link to original Work, Creator Profile, and CC License we have all the pieces that we need for a "Best Practices" creative commons attribution.

There is another attribution manager often used in Pressbooks called "Candela Citation" by Lumen Learning. In this slightly different citation manager, it includes all of the basic fields, and a few others.

Under "Type" the author has the opportunity to identify if the creative commons licensed object is original (this is the first place it has been shared), or whether it is found elsewhere. That's a nice distinction that can be useful.

In addition to "Author," there is space to note an Organization, which can be nice, especially in Higher Ed where Pressbooks is frequently used.

There is a space to mark that something holds a traditional copyright, and there is a nice spot where you can type additional terms. This is really useful for the large amount of media that has very permissive licenses but are not creative commons licensed. For example, I could mark something as Copyrighted, but note in that extra area that a piece of media is licensed under the Pixabay license. Having the ability to select the most commonly used licenses from the dropdown and fill in the blank for others is very appreciated.

The main piece of feedback that I wanted to put into the community call was the idea that the license shouldn't be forced to be a caption. I have created pages for example in a Spanish textbook that had 16 images, one for every vocabulary word. We wanted to attribute properly, but found that putting it in the footer was much better use of screen real estate.

I wondered if the media had all the attribution information attached to it, and possibly autoloaded from openverse when you import the image, that there could be a variety of creative solutions. The idea of an attribution block was floated in the hallway chat, that could display attributions of the media used on the page.

Thank you for bringing this to the team Anne!

[zackkrida]

A new paid plugin doing similar work launched yesterday, called Image Source Control. They describe their features as:

Display credits for individual images

Put image credits where they’re noticed most prominently—right on top of the image itself! Place them as a striking Overlay or customize the layout yourself.

Display image credits for your whole website

Stay on top of images and their sources thanks to a central site-wide register.

Rely on Image Source Control to collect copyright info of each and every image from all over your website and show them as a comprehensive Global list on an existing or dedicated page of your liking.

Never miss a source

Prevent unnecessary troubles that result from missed image sources.

Use Image Source Control’s strong backend toolbox to track and handle missing image sources, including externally hosted images.

If you show images from just a handful of creators, Image Source Control makes your life even easier by letting you define standard and fallback attributions.

Manage image sources conveniently

Photographers dumping their drives on your desk? Don’t break a sweat—take on image libraries of any size by bulk-editing copyright info.

Image Source Control will let you breeze through the task of updating copyright info by editing them directly in the Media Library list view.

Credit flexibly

It’s up to you—choose what to include in your image credits and how to style them:

Provide links both to the copyright owner as well as to the full license text—in accordance with most licensing conditions!
Add your own licenses to the supplied catalog.
Freely determine the content of the attribution line.
Override the default markup and styling.

And for developers, Image Source Control offers plenty of useful action and filter hooks to clip into.

Make more sales

Are you selling your own pictures? Wouldn’t it be nice to use the exposure and offer a link to your portfolio on media buying sites in order to make a couple of sales?

Use the linking feature to direct visitors to your buying site. Do we mind? Heck, we encourage you!

[beckej13820]

Really like the idea that you can attribute images as an overlay or in a site wide register.

My suggestion is to also include an option to display all attributions for an image on a specific page. Like footnotes.