A couple of weeks back, I went to a copyright and digital licensing workshop in beautiful Ithaca, NY at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (if you have never been and you are a birdwatcher, this is a must-see). Informative and overwhelming, the speakers were engaging and extremely knowledgeable, took questions and tried to answer or provide guidance on where to find the answers. Being a copyright newbie, I found all the information helpful, but needed a few days (or weeks) to synthesize it, and now want to present a workshop for library staff on copyright. IDS folks are pretty savvy, but may not know much about licensing agreements. Reference and instruction librarians may have more knowledge about licensing, but still may need a refresher on both DRM and copyright.
Another relevant issue was the support of faculty electronic course reserves in our campus' new course management system (myCourses). We currently have Docutek electronic reserves (ERes), but will no longer support it at the end of May. How do we monitor what faculty are doing with their electronic reserves? Do we need to monitor them or should they be left to manage their own course content? How are other libraries tackling copyright and licensing issues when they have no control over what faculty are putting in their learning repositories? There were no easy answers at the copyright workshop, and I want to think maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but I do feel as though our library has not really thought through the consequences of how we are handling this problem. We will provide support to faculty if they want help in scanning or loading content into their course repositories, but does that mean we are also monitoring copyright abuses? Before, since ERes was housed on a library server, we had total control over procedure and any copyright violations. Now, since myCourses is actually a remote server, do we have control? I'm wondering how other libraries are handling this problem.
On the digital licensing front, there were even more questions than answers. How do we secure access to online resources and manage patrons' expectations? How do we negotiate contracts to get the best deal for our library or consortium? If a license is "silent" on an issue, does that mean you can go ahead and do "it"? (actually that last one did have an answer and it is, "no, you do not have the right to "do it" even if the license is silent on the issue). What about managing digital audio or video content?
I have lots of homework to do...
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