Welcome to the Digital Data Stories of the Alexandria Archive Institute and Open Context! In this Data Story Short, we contextualize our use of the Title-Author-Source-License (TASL) attribution system that Creative Commons (CC) suggests people use with CC licensed works. As an extension of the Sourcing Series, in this short we summarize and use examples from Data Literacy Program (DLP) materials to contextualize TASL. However, if you’d prefer to get this information from the source, check out Recommended practices for attribution on the CC wiki.
Citations and attributions are necessary for reusing any material you didn’t create or don’t own. That’s because they ensure that the reusers of material credit the correct creators and rightsholders. Doing so affirms the right of those people or entities to earn a living from their works. When works are public domain such credits help hosting organizations (like the New York Public Library) who do the work of making those materials available demonstrate the reach of their collections.
Citation and attribution are also important because they’re a kind of linked data that allow people to relocate and connect with the source of something. Or at least the source that someone found. They do this by using words to explain where something came from or by providing web addresses or hyperlinks. However, there are lots of ways to cite and attribute materials. So, why use TASL?
Why we chose TASL
Our programs encourage the use of the open web via thoughtful reuse of research data. To this end, we like to connect with other groups who align with those values, and Creative Commons fits the bill. Specifically, they advocate for “better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest” by providing rightsholders ways to easily license their materials for (re)use. CC licenses allow us to share the works we create as well as easily reuse and incorporate other rightsholders’ materials.
However, licenses also have rules. So to use them correctly you need to understand what the license creators meant by things like “attributing” or stating who a work was “by”. Looking into this led us to Recommended practices for attribution. This wiki is Creative Commons’ recommended attribution format for CC licensed materials. It includes multiple attribution approaches to fit different materials as well as options for the level of detail to include in an attribution.
Creative Commons’ recommended practices provide a nice midground demonstrating that most things don’t need a detailed or scholarly citation. However, they also remind us that hyperlinking back to an online original isn’t enough. This guideline was great for us because it applied to the majority of materials we reuse in our program. It also helped us limit our academic inclination toward expanded citations.
What does TASL mean?
Creative Commons identifies TASL (aka Title-Author-Source-License) as the key components of an appropriate attribution. Each attribution should include the TASL, ideally alongside hyperlinks, so that people can relocate the original version and meet Creative Commons’ reuse licensing requirements. Although the CC recommendations include great explanations for T, A, S, and L, we thought it would be useful to contextualize their use in our Data Literacy Program (DLP) materials to illustrate the flexibility of the system and some challenges that arise when identifying T, A, S, or L.
Title
A “title” is what the rightsholder calls the work. Titles help us identify the specific work being attributed. Often, the rightsholder will establish the piece’s title. On Wikimedia Commons pages, there might be a title section to copy from. In the absence of that, for the DLP, we think about the title in terms of how people will search for the work if we can’t link to the original. That means we use the filename or item description as a work’s title because those regularly include specific identifiers unique to that material.
However, sometimes works share titles so we need to add additional identifiers. An example of this are icons from The Noun Project, which can have a lot of works with the same title. To differentiate amongst them on their site (and for us when we use them) each icon includes a word-based title and the numerical identifier. We preserve both in our TASL attributions so that when we reuse them we’re crediting the correct original.
When we (the DLP) create original works (either from scratch or adapted from other materials) we see “title” as synonymous with “file name”. Due to this, we also use descriptive titles. While they can be long, descriptive titles make searching, sorting, and managing our works digitally, easier. They do this by being human readable and including important phrases that help us find our local version in case we don’t remember the exact “title” or “filename” or where we saved it. This approach also means we invest in good file naming practices, which probably deserves their own Data Story Short!
Author
Another important takeaway from the CC guidelines is that “author” does not equal “creator” when attributing something. Author, in TASL at least, refers to who or what controls the use, dissemination, and alteration of the work, aka the rightsholder. As we discussed in Creative Commons Basics, rightsholders can be the original creator but they can also be companies, organizations, or other entities (for example, when other rightsholders hold the copyright of “work for hire” materials).
Wikimedia Commons includes places to list a variety of authors, creators, and rightsholders. Their pages are also careful to distinguish between the creator of the image, the creator of things within the image, the uploader, and other potential authors/rightsholders. Anyone wanting to reuse images from Wikimedia Commons should pay close attention to these differentiations to ensure they attribute the right author.
When the DLP puts an author in a TASL attribution, we include the appropriate rightsholder and, if those are different, the original creator as well. Both are important because sometimes photographs include images of things that have their own copyrights. Due to this, we encourage folks to thoroughly investigate the information you have about the author, rightsholder, and especially the uploader of the digital image. Sometimes this means one attribution will include multiple people or entities to ensure that everyone’s rights are credited correctly.
Regardless of how many rightsholders you needs to include, you will find them after the word “by” in most DLP attributions (or in any TASL attributions). Sometimes rightsholders are listed by their first and last name, but others may be listed by their username because that’s what we have to identify them by or how they’ve chosen to identify themselves for credit.
Source
The source is the place where someone should be able to find the exact work that you’re crediting. In printed materials, this would be where you’d list the journal, volume, issue, page number, and/or a webpage. When it comes to digital images or online materials, a hyperlink and web address (or DOI or ARK) is the best way to include the source.
However, sometimes you need to do more than include the digital link. For some materials, you need to list the organization and possibly use specific wording to credit the organization. We do this for materials from the NYPL, which requests that folks credit them with a permanent link and the phrase “Courtesy of The New York Public Library. www.nypl.org” for materials from their website.
Describing and (hyper)linking are helpful when people want to find the item or image depicted, or reproduced, or if the image itself was reproduced under specific permissions, such as when a photograph of a museum object is reproduced in a digital article. In these cases, sometimes there’s no online “original source”. Therefore, you should list the photograph number, the museum that holds the original, and other identifying information so people can relocate it and so the repository gets credit for stewarding the work. Often collections like that will have a protocol you’ll need to follow for attribution, so we suggest reaching out to individual reproduction offices about their requirements.
Regardless of where you find materials, we recommend investigating your online source. Specifically, it’s important to know whether they aggregate materials from other places and, if they do, whether those places have their own reuse requirements. This means that you should take the time to read through the documentation for a digital piece or website to ensure the attribution includes the correct source(s).
When the DLP includes a source, we list the organization (i.e. Open Context, Wikimedia Commons, or the NYPL). After that, we often include the full URL, DOI, ARK, or web address to that source in text. We regularly choose to spell those out rather than just hyperlink in case the link breaks, doesn’t copy over between platforms, or becomes inaccessible after a download or when printed. This allows our audiences to search for the item (or an archived version) even if the direct link stops working or disappears.
In most TASL attributions, you will find sources after the word “from”. Right after “from” will be the name of the source. In DLP attributions, we’ll often include the spelled out link (in parentheses) after the source. For example, “…from Open Context (https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k23r17177)” as in the image credits for the Digital Data Story To Disrupt and Delight: Teaching Archaeology Through Narrative.
License
The license is the specific documentation that outlines how a material may be reused by people who are not the rightsholder. For most DLP creations, we license and reuse materials with CC licenses because they are written to work together even if they have different stipulations. However, Creative Commons isn’t the way to license creative works.
Creations may have automatic copyright applied, be in the public domain, or use other licensing systems like GNU and MIT. People and groups create licenses or licensing systems for all kinds of materials. Regardless of which license provider someone uses, they all have the goal to protect creative people’s (or entities’) abilities to sustain themselves economically with their creations, should they desire it. The nice thing about licenses is that they also make those things sharable, should the rightsholder desire it.
For the DLP, we license our materials using Creative Commons and strive to use the least restrictive CC licenses. Sometimes that means giving different licenses to different parts of our materials. That way we honor the original rightsholder’s license while allowing the parts that we made wholly ourselves to be under the least restrictive license.
In our own attributions, we follow the TASL system for including licenses by having a slash (/) and then listing the initials of our chosen CC license. As a bonus, we also link to the license so people can read more about it in our credits sections at the end of our Data Stories and other resources.
Conclusion
If you poke around the DLP you’ll see TASL citations in a lot of places. They pop up in our full-length Digital Data Stories and in our Data Story Shorts. You’ll even find a bunch of examples below, in this short’s Credits section. Regardless of where you find them, TASL is just one way to attribute materials and another system might better fit your needs. However, it’s a format that works well for our materials because it aligns with our goal of giving credit where it’s due and linking data through the open web.
We hope this article provided some context for the what, why, and how of the TASL attribution system so you’re better equipped to identify them out in the world and use them yourself. If you have any questions or feedback to provide to this short, don’t hesitate to reach out at: datastories@opencontext.org.
References and further reading
We list our references in order of appearance in the text or include suggestions for further reading on the presented topics. References that include DOIs or URLs are not repeated in this section and we include links for images in this piece in the Credits section. If any links navigate to a broken page, please check the Wayback Machine for an archived copy of the material.
Check out other Digital Data Stories here: https://doi.org/10.6078/M74F1NW0
Find out about the work of the Alexandria Archive Institute at: https://alexandriaarchive.org/
Explore Open Context for yourself through this link: https://opencontext.org
Find other Sourcing Series articles via: https://alexandriaarchive.org/tag/sourcing-series/
The Creative Commons Wiki provides recommendations for attributing materials with their licenses: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Recommended_practices_for_attribution
Learn more about citation and attribution in: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2024/10/10/introduction-to-citation-and-attribution/
Organizations like the New York Public Library spend a lot of time digitizing and hosting online collections learn more about how we use them at: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2025/07/10/how-to-use-the-digital-collections-of-the-nypl/
Read the mission of Creative Commons at: https://creativecommons.org/about/
This page has a really great section on titles for materials: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hairpin-IMG_0446.JPG
Explore some of our uses of the Noun Project here: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2025/07/03/handy-image-subscription-services-for-archaeology/
See our introduction to Creative Commons at: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2024/08/09/creative-commons-basics/
Learn more about the concept of work for hire through Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
Check out Wikimedia Commons image collections at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Check out how we’ve used Wikimedia Commons in this article: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2025/07/17/tips-on-wikimedia-commons/
Explore materials from the New York Public Library at: https://www.nypl.org/
Here’s the page on how to use NYPL materials from their websites: https://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/legal-notices/website-terms-and-conditions
Find To Disrupt and Delight: Teaching Archaeology Through Narrative at: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7X928FR
If you need a refresher on copyright and licenses check out our article on those topics: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2024/07/05/introduction-to-licenses-and-copyright/
We wrote a short introduction to public domain here: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2024/08/02/basics-of-public-domain/
Not sure what GNU is learn more at: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html
Explore the MIT license to see if it works for you and your creations: https://tlo.mit.edu/understand-ip/exploring-mit-open-source-license-comprehensive-guide
Try out our other Data Story Shorts here: https://alexandriaarchive.org/tag/data-story-short/
The current Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (CC BY-SA 3.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 France license (CC BY-SA 3.0 France): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en
The Creative Commons CC0 or “No Rights Reserved” or public domain: https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/
The current Creative Commons Attribution-ShareALike license (CC BY-SA): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Find archived copies of these pages, where possible, at: https://web.archive.org/
Credits
Unless otherwise specified this work and its components are shared under a CC BY license. To attribute this work, please use our suggested citation:
Paulina F. Przystupa, 2025, “How to use TASL attribution”, Data Stories Program, Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context, Published Online, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7FX77KW.
In order of appearance, this Data Story includes the following credited and licensed materials:
“AAI-OC_DataStoryShortPublished_Header-HowToTASL” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY.
A cropped copy of “Foter.com_infographic_CC.jpg” by Foter from their piece “How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos” (https://foter.com/blog/how-to-attribute-creative-commons-photos/) / CC BY-SA 3.0.
Screen capture of page 15 of “Tome Reader: The AAI Reads Comics Book Club” by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2025) from Data Stories Program, Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context (https://doi.org/10.6078/M7K64G75) / CC BY.
Screen capture of our download history from The Noun Project. It includes the icons for “Pyramid #26760” and “Pyramid #637005” by luca orlandini and bezier master respectively from The Noun Project (https://thenounproject.com/icon/pyramid-26760/ and https://thenounproject.com/icon/pyramid-637005/) under a royalty-free license.
“Hairpin” by an unknown artist / public domain, the piece was photographed by Rama as “Hairpin-IMG 0446” who shared and uploaded the work (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hairpin-IMG_0446.JPG) to Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 France.
“Old Spanish Mission, New Smyrna, Fla.” (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-a3c8-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) by the Detroit Publishing Company (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?filters%5Bpublisher_mtxt_s%5D%5B%5D=Detroit+Publishing+Company&keywords=&layout=false) from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/divisions/the-miriam-and-ira-d-wallach-division-of-art-prints-and-photographs-photography) of the New York Public Library and determined to be in the public domain.
“LayersOfLicensing” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP is a screencapture of the page “File:Hairpin-IMG 0446.JPG” from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hairpin-IMG_0446.JPG). Both are licensed as follows, “All structured data from the file namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; all unstructured text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License“.
Acknowledgements
This is Version 1.0, published July 2025. At this time, this page has not been updated since initial publication. Updates and changes will be noted here if this page changes.
This Data Story Short is a collaboration between the author and AAI/OC staff who reviewed this and other Sourcing Series materials before publication. We are grateful to Creative Commons for all the work they do and to those who maintain the Recommended practices for attribution page. That entry informed our practices and inspired us to delve deeper into the diverse ways we can give people credit for the work that they do.
