Question
Hi!
I am a business student at California State University San Marcos and am working on a project for Quail Botanical Gardens and the Children's Discovery Museum of Carlsbad, which are both organizations aimed at educating children. While I was searching your website, I found several great activities for grades K-6 on the topic of electricity.
My team and I are creating a website for the 2 organizations mentioned above, and were wondering if we would be allowed to post these electricity activities on the website we are creating. We will have a section on our website for k-4 teachers to access and download the activities for in-class use.
If posting the activities on our website for teachers to download is possible, can you please let me know how you would like the activities credited (sited for copyright reasons)?
If posting these activities is not possible, and you know of any alternative routes, please don't hesitate to let us know :)
My team and I would really appreciate your help!
Sincerely,
Angie Russ
*if you need an alternative email address, it is:
russ019@csusm.edu
Answer
As a general rule, the NSDL does not hold or manage copyrights for library content, as these usually are held by the original providers or creators of the resources. The NSDL typically deals only with information _about_ these resources (i.e., "metadata"), including pointers to them. Hence the best way to learn about pertinent copyrights is to examine the resource of interest (which may entail finding the parent Web site in which the resource is embedded). For example "©2005 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc." appears at the bottom of the NSDL-referenced page athttp://pbskids.org/dragonflytv/knowhow/index.html, and additional information can be found athttp://pbskids.org/. <br /> <br />As an alternative to gaining the permissions that would be required to post materials on your own Web site, you might consider simply pointing your users to the original sources, in the same way that NSDL does. That is, you might embed pointers (i.e., URLs) to the items of interest within your Web page, surrounding them with context-setting and other explanatory information, including citations. In that way, your service becomes one of referral, which typically bypasses the need for permissions, etc. <br /> <br />Of course we would love to have you acknowledge us on your Web site, perhaps indicating that the electricity-related materials were discovered using the (NSF-sponsored) NSDL, and that many other materials of interest may be found there as well. copyright, citation, posting http://vrd.askvrd.org/services/answerschema.xml
