Journal of Copyright in Education & Librarianship

Teaching Copyright Law through Participatory Involvement in an Unconference Setting

Amanda McCormick — 2020-04-22

An “unconference” is an attempt by librarians and other professionals to work outside of the traditional conference model. Presenters are encouraged to break out of traditional modes of presentation and try new methods of engaging with the participants. We submitted an idea for a session focused on demystifying domestic and international copyright law and discussing how the law affects libraries and archives. Modern librarianship demands at least a basic understanding of copyright and intellectual property issues, and librarians have reported that they lack training and knowledge in this area. We determined that we did not want to present a formal lecture on copyright in libraries, especially given the freedom and intellectual experimentation encouraged by an unconference setting. Instead, we determined that the best way to present copyright principles would be to share examples of real-life scenarios with the participants and assist them in applying the principles of copyright law to those situations. We hoped that participants would build confidence in their ability to respond when copyright issues arose at the workplace. This paper outlines the approach we took to prepare and present this unconventional session, and it includes an assessment of the results.

2018: A Streaming Video Odyssey

Anali Perry — 2020-09-01

In this case study, we reflect on our journey through a major revision of our streaming video reserve guidelines, informed by an environmental scan of comparable library services and current copyright best practices. Once the guidelines were revised, we developed an implementation plan for communicating changes and developing training materials to both instructors and internal library staff. We share our navigation strategies, obstacles faced, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges. Finally, we map out some of our future directions for improving and streamlining our services.

Open Access Legislation and Regulation in the United States: Implications for Higher Education

Anjam Chaudhary — 2020-11-30

Accessing quality research when not part of an academic institution can be challenging. Dating back to the 1980s, open access (OA) was a response to journal publishers who restricted access to publications by requiring a subscription and limited access to knowledge. Although the OA movement seeks to remove costly barriers to accessing research, especially when funded by state and federal governments, it remains the subject of continuous debates. After providing a brief overview of OA, this article summarizes OA statutory and regulatory developments at the federal and state levels regarding free and open access to research. It compares similarities and differences among enacted and proposed legislation and describes the advantages and disadvantages of these laws. It analyzes the effects of these laws in higher education, especially on university faculty regarding tenure and promotion decisions as well as intellectual property rights to provide recommendations and best practices regarding the future of legislation and regulation in the United States.

The Rights Statement Selection Tool

Gabriel Galson — 2020-04-22

Through the standardized rights statements it provides, RightsStatements.org allows institutions to clearly communicate the copyright status of digitized cultural heritage works, promoting their reuse. However, it can be tricky for institutions to determine correct statement usage through the site without additional context. The Rights Statement Selection Tool [bit.ly/RSSTOOL] is an interactive infographic that serves to visually explain the statement selection workflow, allowing a copyright novice to identify the correct statement through decision tree alone. This legal tool lets cultural heritage institutions assign rights statement review work to non-experts, potentially increasing the number of items that can be evaluated. It’s meant to be integrated into cataloging workflows: clickable links lead to each statement’s URI page, and it can be viewed in a browser alongside the RightsStatements.org site. The Tool serves as a complete visual reference to the statements: each is covered and explained. It aggregates relevant resources and serves as a structural bridge between related copyright status determination charts and Creative Commons charts. Donation agreements–often a source of confusion for rights statements reviewers–are covered as well. The Tool is, by design, as agnostic to national law as possible. The US-centered copyright status determination charts that feed into it (such as the Hirtle and Sunstein charts) could easily be swapped for resources reflecting other countries’ national law; the RightsStatements.org logic that it covers would remain unchanged, and so would the chart. As the RightsStatements.org standard goes global, this tool can be translated, adapted, and re-used beyond the US.