How to reuse material from Oracc

You are very welcome to reuse material from any Oracc project, as long as you abide by that project's licensing terms. Here we give some practical tips on how to do this most effectively online, but our suggestions are not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive.

Oracc's licensing

The Oracc default license is the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, described here. If you abide by this license you do not need to ask permission for reusing Oracc material. If you want to reuse Oracc material under different licensing terms, please email osc at oracc dot org to make an enquiry.

However some projects, especially those like SAAo [http://oracc.org/saao/] which reuse previously published material, may have different terms. Copyright may be held by the original author and/or publisher.

Note too that individual images, PDFs or other downloads used by Oracc sites may come from other sources and thus be subject to copyright.

You should be able to find details of copyright or licensing in the footer of the relevant page. Each project should also have a prominent link to its licensing terms, written in clear language. If you have any questions or problems about the copyright or license of an individual object, please contact the project director or send an email to osc at oracc dot org.

Copying and pasting

The easiest way to reuse text from an Oracc portal site is just to cut and paste it into your own site, remembering to attribute it to the relevant Oracc project and (if appropriate) individual author. If you cannot find the project-specific guidance on how to give the attribution, please email osc at oracc dot org for help.

Linking

Oracc uses a system of stable URIs, or Uniform Resource Identifiers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI], for its pages, and elements of its pages. This means that if you link to an Oracc page, or part of an Oracc page, you can be confident that the link will not break.

Linking to an Oracc corpus

URIs are not always the same as the URL you see in the browser bar when you visit an Oracc corpus page. Use the instructions on citing Oracc URLs online in order to link to Oracc's corpus pages most effectively.

Linking to an Oracc portal

Linking to Oracc's portal pages is very straightforward: you can just copy the URL you see in your browser. You can link to any heading or subheading too, as they all have <a> tags attached to them automatically.

You can find out the id attribute of each heading by viewing the page's source code in your browswer, or read a more technical description (written for Oracc content creators) here.

Listing texts

One of the most exciting features of Oracc URIs is that you can make your own lists of cuneiform texts from across the Oracc corpora—that is, you can make your own ad hoc Oracc corpus.

For instance, you can create a list of transliterations for a reading class, or collect together translations of texts that share a particular word or feature. Instructions are given on the citing Oracc URLs page.

Images and downloads

You are welcome to re-use images and downloads that have been created by Oracc projects, as long as you follow the appropriate licensing terms. In fact many Oracc projects include a dedicated page of links to reusable resources.

We recommend that you keep links to the originals on Oracc as well as, or instead of, hosting copies on your own site. That way you can be sure that your users have access to the most up-to-date versions.

Embedding objects

A text from an Oracc corpus

To embed a text from an Oracc's project's corpus in your ESP page, you will need to know the its ID-number: a six-digit number prefixed by P, Q or X. Use the following code:

<object width="380px" height="240px" data="http://oracc.org/PROJECT/P000000/html" title="[your text here]"> 
</object>

Remember to replace the word PROJECT with the Oracc code for the relevant project or subproject (e.g., saao/saa17 or etcsri). Substitute P000000 with the ID-number of the text you want. You can resize the embedded page by changing the value of the width and height attributes.

Here, for instance, is the text SAA 10, 176 (P334126) from SAAo/SAA10, with the width set to 600px:

Note that the page comes with its own licensing terms attached, so you do not have to worry about that.

For more examples of different types of Oracc corpus page to embed, including glossary entries and catalogue data, see the page on citing Oracc URLs.

Cuneify

Cuneify [~/saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed/cuneify/] is a tool developed by Steve Tinney which generates cuneiform script from alphabetic transliteration. To embed Cuneify into your website, copy the following code:

<form action="http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/cuneify">
<p><input type="text" size="50" name="input" value="type your transliteration here" /></p>
<p><input type="submit" name="button" value="Cuneify" /></p>
</form>

This will produce a form that looks like this:

You should point out on your website that to use Cuneify, visitors need to install at least one cuneiform font. At the moment, it is not possible to do this on a mobile phone.

You may also want to copy, or link to, our tips for correct input [~/saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed/cuneify/#h_tipsforcorrectinput].

If you are creating an Oracc portal page with Cuneify in it, you should also add the following line of code before <form>:

<p><input type="hidden" name="project" value="saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed" /></p>

There is more technical documentation on Cuneify here.

18 Dec 2019 osc at oracc dot org

Eleanor Robson

Eleanor Robson, 'How to reuse material from Oracc', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/visitingoracc/reusingoracc/]