Professional Development

I started out bright and early this morning filling in for Wanda at a (free) Serials Solution breakfast where they announced the commercial release of their latest product “Summon,” a web-scale discovery service. This, finally, is the answer that libraries need: it “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” It’s “not federated searching, and goes past next gen catalogs. “And, the speaker proclaimed, history will look back on this day as the day libraries took back leadership of discovery of content. OK, I admit, I actually broke out into laughter at this announcement, and that got the rest of my breakfast table chuckling along with me. I quickly got control of myself and listened to three beta partners report on their experiences, issues and hope for this new tool that is going to do away with silos (sorry, Lynn, that’s what they said). David Seamans (who did some consulting work for us back in the day) is now at Dartmouth and he talked about their beta process. You can take a look at the product on the Dartmouth web site. The other two beta sites were Oklahoma State University (a Voyager site) and Western Michigan (also a Voyager site). The consensus was that there is still plenty that needs to be done but that it is speedy. It’s built on the same architecture as VuFind (Solr and AJAX) and one of its main architects is Andrew Nagy of VuFind fame. The most interesting speaker (for us) was Scott Garrison from Western Michigan who talked at length about their VuFind project and might be a good contact for Erik and his group, as they are preparing to go production on it next month.

Following this, I caught the shuttle bus down to McCormick Place to get my missing badge holder. While there, I ran into Debbie Nolan, and my old mentor from PLCMC, Pat Ryckman. I visited the exhibits and got all the pertinent info to get a trophy and t-shirt at tomorrow morning’s Alibris 5K (plus get to Lynn’s presentation on time). I also ran into Carloyn McCallum at the ALA Bookstore (None of my book on display, either they are sold out or too out-of-date, or both!).

I attended a session sponsored by ACRL on “Designing Effective Research Surveys.” Regina McBride, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, gave a well organized program that would have been very helpful to anyone new to doing survey research, but after 45 minutes when we went into group work without enough worksheets to go around, I left. I did get information on freely available sample calculators that can help you determine if your sample size is enough: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm and http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html

This afternoon I spent in back-to-back committee meetings for the LITA National Forum Planning Committee. I am on this year’s committee as well as next year’s. This year, the conference is in Salt Lake City Oct. 1-4, and next year it will be in Atlanta. This year’s conference is shaping up nicely and has over 30 concurrent sessions, poster sessions, 2 preconferences and three keynote speakers. One of the interesting things that is done to involve higher participation is 2 sessions of “lightening talks.” This is an opportunity for people to talk (for 5 minutes!) about new technology projects that they are working on, perhaps ones that weren’t in existence when proposals were due several months ago. I volunteered, with Karen Schneider, to be the “wranglers” for this, meaning we will put out a call for proposals, set it up and oversee them. When talk turned to recording the keynote speakers, somehow I found myself volunteering to help record them, since I have such recent experience (and we have the equipment). I’ll be working with another committee member on that, but I hope that my co-producer from the South trip (aka Erik) will be willing to help us

Tonight, Proquest is having a reception at the Art Institute, one of my favorite art museums. I hope to catch up with some of the ZSR Library folks there, as well as meet some new colleagues.

Roz, Susan and I started out the day with the “Chocolate, Wine and Waterfalls” tour. The tour was populated with two buses full of librarians, so I guess there were plenty interested here at the conference. (The tour of area glass blowing facilities, didn’t make it, however.) It was a fun and engaging tour of the region. I’ve been here to Seattle several times since both of my sisters live here, but hadn’t ever done a real organized tour combining these three fabulous things.

Roz and Susan sat together on the bus with me on the seat behind them so I had an opportunity to meet a librarian who sat down next to me. His name was Nigel, originally from Belfast, who used to work at Notre Dame, and now works as the Univesity Librarian at Franklin College in …wait for it…Switzerland! He was very easy to talk to, but somehow we never got around to sharing stories of challenges in libraries, aside from the economic situation, which is truly worldwide. Over lunch, we discovered he had worked with Caroline Numbers, and wrote her a letter of recommendation before she came to Wake Forest. Small world.

I think that Susan’s pics will tell more of the day than my words will, but aside from the fact that the tour was very rushed, (they planned too much, but needed to get back to the Conference Center in time for the Keynote speaker), it was well done. Expect some chocolate on our return!

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the keynote speaker, Rushworth Kidder. He was filling in for Naomi Klein, author of No Logos, and I had been looking forward to hearing her speak. We all agreed after Kidder’s speech that he did a good job. He clearly defined the problems of our time as attributable to a lack of ethics more than the result of economics or politics. He galvanized us to continue to cling to our ethical roots, and honored the profession of librarianship several times in his speech.

From there, we went to the Exhibits floor where I met up with several former colleagues from Wayne State. We had dinner at the hors d’oeuvres table. Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest.

Whew! Midwinter was busy, productive, and good this go around!

As you know I typically blog each event and pull the posts together into daily posts here. This time I quickly realized that I wouldn’t even have the time for that type of reporting, so I did daily posts over on my blog, and I’m pulling them together here into one conference post. If you want more details, here are the daily posts: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. If you want more details than that, let me know! I have lots of notes, but just didn’t have the time to process them into blog posts. Here’s the summary of what I’ve been up to (in alphabetical order and bulleted for easier reading):

Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange Round Table

Discussion Group on Staff Development

• CLENE is a group that focuses on staff development
• Some issues can be resolved with training and others can be resolved with strong supervision
• Discussed merits of online training
• Talked about the relationship of management and training
• Discussed our perception of ourselves vs. our patron’s perceptions, and a lot of vocabulary issues.

Reception (hosted by Pat Wagner)

• I just learned of and met Pat at this conference, but I am really impressed with her! She ran an exercise for the Emerging Leaders Town Hall, hosted this reception, and was an active participant of the CLENE discussion group.
• This reception was an excellent introduction to CLENE, and I met one of my local Twitter friends face-to-face, Lori Reed!
• I also ran into Peter Bromberg, so we followed up on some of the activities from earlier in the day, and I got some good advice on some of the areas I want to work on developing.

ACRL Women’s Studies Section

• I’m a member of the Instruction Committee and we’re doing interesting work!
• Rewriting the Information Literacy standards for Women’s Studies
• The committee hopes to present on this topic at the National Women’s Studies Association conference

Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship

• Every once in a while there is a question of the value of COSWL. We’ve done a good job over the last three years of keeping active and involved so those questions wouldn’t be asked. However, at this meeting there were only three members present (we were outnumbered by observers).
• Discussed the nature of committees formed by presidential appointment
• Considered possible partnerships
• We agreed that all the virtual work the committee had been doing was a good thing, and we would continue doing so (including using the listserv to find a time that would fit more people’s schedules)
• The second meeting is tomorrow, so I’m not posting the details here yet. I imagine it will be a continuation of the discussion we had earlier at the conference.

Emerging Leaders Town Hall

• I figured I’d see what this meeting was like since I’m just one year out, and I was really impressed.
• Leslie Burger, Maureen Sullivan, and Connie Paul ran the meeting as usual.
• A number of useful (and not too stressful!) networking exercises
• Feedback from participants on what ALA should look like in the future

LITA, general

Top Tech Trends

• Susan and I attended this together, but came from another session, so we got in about an hour into it
• Standing room only, but it was interesting enough to merit standing for the hour we were there
• While we were there, the discussed trends included: changing in publishing paradigm (for books and newspapers), the broadband divide, and changing displays. When asked how many in the audience have more than one monitor at their workspace, I was surprised that it seemed over half raised their hand. I wonder if it is the norm, or if a techy crowd would be more likely than a non-techy crowd.
• If you’re interested, you can watch it here!
  
• (Because what they did is so great, I’m cutting and pasting this bit straight from my blog): But the most important part of this year’s Top Tech Trends was the use of technology. It was amazing. Official tags allowed audience members (both in the room and across the country) to follow what was going on in various channels. Ustream surpassed 20 people. The FriendFeed room pulled everything together. This was exactly how it should be. LITA demonstrating how these tools can be applied to allow ALA to positively impact more people in the profession. It’s good for us as professionals looking to learn more, it’s good marketing (I knew we could still go to Top Tech Trends because of the Twitter messages I was getting in my breakfast session), and it’s good practice as information professionals. Kudos to Jason Griffey, BIGWIG, and TTT for showing how it can be done.

The LITA Town Hall Breakfast

• LITA Town Halls are planned by LITA’s Vice President and tend to focus on issues around what LITA is or should be and how to position the organization for the future.
• This one was lead by a consultant that had small groups consider different aspects of LITA (competing organizations, what areas of IT LITA should address, how we can collaborate better, etc) and then share out to the group.
• I got there a bit early and missed the formation of the Twittering/Google Docing/Live Blogging table, but felt like I was sitting there because of their awesome technology use. Though I was sitting with my group, I could follow along with a larger discussion (including with people across the country) in a number of ways. This is what was on my laptop:
  
  The panel on the left is a live blog, and the columns on the right were for friendfeed and twitter. This is an example of an awesome use of technology, and a great way to get more voices heard. I’m not sure what will come of the brainstorming in the meeting, but at a minimum, this demonstration of how these tools can be used effectively was worth it.

LITA Distance Learning Interest Group

LITA Committee and Interest Group Chairs Joint Meeting

• This meeting is for the chairs of all the LITA committees and interest groups.
• This meeting gets all the LITA leadership into one room: board, chairs, staff, etc
• Discussed transparency in scheduling and decided to use the LITA wiki for this purpose
• LITA Forum will have amazing keynoters (David Weinberger, Liz Lawley, and Joan Lippincott) and is still accepting program proposals. (Man, I’ve got to get on that! Thanks for being part of this, Susan!!)
• Walt Crawford started an interesting discussion on the similarities of “publications” and “communication” committees, and where are the lines of publishing for a group with print publications, electronic ones, a website, a blog, a wiki, a listserv, etc.

Distance Learning Interest Group Discussion

• (I’ll be posting real notes for this session on my blog, on the LITA blog, and on the DLIG blog.)
• I chair this group, so this was my top priority of the conference.
• I was a bit worried about the DLIG this conference. We don’thave a set membership and different people show up at the discussions at each conference, so it’s hard to know ahead of time how it will be. I thought with it being cold, in Denver, and with the budget issues so many people are facing we wouldn’t have hardly anyone. Instead we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20.
• We talked about text messaging, screencasting, and a little on embedded librarians and content management systems.
• We’re establishing a discussion list and will hopefully be doing some exciting things in the near future.

LITA Web Coordinating Committee

• This was my first meeting with the LITA Web Coordinating Committee.
• I am starting this term as part of mycommitmentto LITA for their sponsorship of me in the Emerging Leaders program.
• It takes a while to figure out the social dynamics of a committee, the charge, and what the committee is actually able to do. I’m still feeling it out.
• It does look like there might be some changes to the site in the next year or so, though, so I’ll probably be around for that.

Programs

Alexander Street Press Breakfast

• Susan and I attended the Alexander Street Press breakfast. It’s always a great event.
• First, I really think Alexander Street Press understands where information is moving, and they’re leading edge thinkers about how to provide content for users now and in the future.
• Perhaps even more exciting, they are figuring out ways to allow users to search through video content quickly and locate specific spots in the video the user needs. It’s amazing stuff.
• Second, they always have a great speaker (and provide a great looking breakfast). So, for leading edge issues: they now have a database of graphic novel/comic materials.
• As for their speaker, this year, because of the new database, they invited Art Spiegelman. He was an engaging speaker and gave me a lot to think about (in terms of conveying information in text and space, using images to cause people to think critically about culture, displacing norms)…. it was a great talk. He also helped me justify my recent interest in graphic novels

SPARC-ACRL Forum on Open Educational Resources

• Panelist: Richard Baraniuk, an architect of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration and founder of Connexions
• Panelist: David Wiley, also a leader of the Cape Town Declaration and Chief Openness Officer (cool, no?) for Flat World Knowledge
• Panelist: Nicole Allen, leader of the Student PIRGs Make Textbooks Affordable campaign
• Panelist: Mark Nelson,Digital Content Strategist for the National Association of College Stores, the trade association representing the higher education retail industry
• This panel gave a great presentation and discussed interesting topics. Some practical issues were addressed (like getting started on your own campus) as well as more theoretical ones (do textbooks even make sense in a constructivist environment?)
• The most striking point, to me, was if the government requires open access topubliclyfunded research, why don’t we require open access topubliclyfunded educational materials?

Other ALA Notes

• Sarah and I roomed (which was really nice!) at the Curtis Hotel (which was the funnest hotel I’ve ever stayed at!) Our room was on the 13th floor, which was horror themed. When the elevator stopped it said, “heeeere’s Johnny!” and there was a picture from The Shining right outside the door. It was great rooming with Sarah, we were able to eat a few meals together which was really nice.
• I saw a bunch of ZSR folks! Sarah and I, obviously saw each other quite a bit. One evening we got dinner with Steve. I ran into Wanda in the convention center (though I was so in-my-own-head that I almost missed her!) Susan and I spent Sunday morning together and saw each other at the LITA happy hour. Steve, Sarah, and I ran into Debbie Nolan. She seemed to be doing well. I never saw Lauren, but I know Susan and Sarah did. It’s amazing how at such a large conference you can see so many people you know.
• It was COLD. I mean WAY colder than the weather channel said it would be when I left Winston-Salem. I mean the type of weather where I don’t even own appropriate shoes.
  
• That being said, this was a fabulously walkable conference. Our hotel was three blocks from the convention center, and there was a great free bus that ran through downtown.
• Everyone was talking about Tough Economic Times. Attendance was way down. Every meeting I was in talked about the economy in terms of how it’s impacting the organization, libraries, and/or communities.
• Blogs seemed to play less of a role at this conference, and Twitter/Liveblogging/streaming video played way more. It dawned on me at one point that I used to keep my RSS reader open throughout the conference to see what was going on. I barely cracked it on this trip, insteadincessantlyupdating and watching Twitter. I actually think this might be a move towards the positive. There were several meetings where people all over the country participated because of the real-time nature of Twitter.
• I am gearing up to focus my energy on LITA. At this point I think LITA has the best chance at impacting ALA and making it a better organization. I also know that I need to focus my committee energy a bit more to be more effective. My WSS and COSWL terms are coming to an end at Annual, and I’m not going to seek out any replacements in areas non-LITA sections of ALA. WSS was incredibly welcoming to me as a new professional. COSWL gave me incredible insights into how ALA works and what we need to do to be effective, but spreading my time across ACRL, LITA, and the council committee meant that I couldn’t make a real impact in any one. It’s time to see what changes I can really make happen.

A Cold Denver Night Scene

Sunday was a day full of meetings, presentations and networking for me that ran from 7:30 am to 11:00 pm (way past my usual bedtime!). Neither of my committees met, so I had the flexibility to pick and choose how to structure my day. The day was cold with snow flurries, which added a wintery dimension moving from location to location.

Last ALA, Lauren P. introduced me to the Alexander Street Press customer appreciation breakfast. Not only do they provide a good substantial meal, they also bring in an excellent speaker. It’s a popular function and this time there were about 550 attendees. The speaker was Pulitzer prize winner Art Spiegelman, a comic artist best known for his graphic novel Maus. In his talk, he was very passionate in advocating for the medium of comics as one that gives a full texture of experience. I am a unabashed daily comics reader, but have never really studied the art of comics. After listening to Mr Spiegelman talk about his art, I think I have found a new interest to dig into.

At ALA, there are always competing events, and LITA’s “Top Technology Trends” meeting began during the breakfast time slot. But Lauren and I were able to arrive in time to hear the final hour, which was when the panelists share their pick for the current top trends. I’m sure Lauren will give us a full report on the meeting, so I’ll leave the details for her! The technologies they used to chronicle the meeting was the most advanced to date, including a live blog.

Afterward, I met with my ALA Editions editor for preliminary discussion on perhaps doing a 3rd edition of my book (seems promising). I ran into our former colleague Emily Stambaugh and had an early lunch while we caught up on what we’ve been up to since she went west (4 years ago, how time flies). She’s now at the California Digital Library managing their shared print program.

For my afternoon session, I chose a discussion event: “Teaching 2.0: What are the Pedagogical Implications of Social Technologies?” It must be a hot topic, as over 200 people showed up to a room sized for about half that many. Each table discussed how 2.0 technologies inform our teaching in the framework of David Wiley’s changes in the world that compare then/now: analog-print/digital; closed/open; tethered/mobile; isolated/connected; generic/personal; consumption/participation. We concentrated on four “teaching 2.0″ qualities: openess, connectivity, personalization and participation. After talking and sharing, I came away with a good feeling about what we are doing with our IL program at ZSR. We seem to be ahead of the curve compared to other programs because of our instructors’ enthusiasm for exploring ways to incorporate active learning and participatory pedagogy with the 2.0 technologies.

I wrapped my day up with a series of social/networking events, a departure from my usual “one evening function” approach. I attended a reunion of Harvard Leadership Institute alumni which was hosted by ACRL. Then I headed out in the COLD night air (single digit) to meet Bill for dinner and good conversation. My final destination (again through the cold) was to an Elsevier reception where Lauren C. introduced me to many of her friends and colleagues from her ALA work and Emory days.

This morning I’ll wrap up my conference with one last meeting, then head off to the airport for the long trip home. All-in-all, I vote this a successful conference experience.

LITA goes until noon on Sunday, and since the only return direct flight to Greensboro after the close of the conference isn’t until 7:25 pm this evening (sigh), I’ll spend the time before the shuttle comes to take me to the airport to wrap up.

This morning began at a breakfast of this year’s and next year’s LITA National Forum Planning Committee. There were lively discussions about what worked this time around and what could be done better or differently next year in Salt Lake City. Everyone agreed that this has been a successful Forum, but there are always new ideas generated and feedback received from attendees that can be considered to make the next conference even better.

Poster sessions were presented this morning during the breakfast hour. Most of the topics were about projects that are familiar topics at ZSR, so it was interesting to see how other institutions had approached things like viral marketing, open source applications (see Erik’s post), Google Analytics and using del.icio.us as bookmarks to create virtual reference.

There was one final round of concurrent sessions, so I attended “Illogical Students: don’t Blame ‘Em, Game ‘Em,” where librarian Marsh Spiegelman and mathematics professor Richard Glass from Nassau Community College shared their combined effort to incorporate information literacy into math/computer science courses. They were doing some interesting things with blogs, wikis and Second Life. Some of their ideas are shared in their wiki.

R. David Lankes, from the Information Institute of Syracuse and professor at the School of Information Studies, gave the final keynote presentation. His topic was “Obligation of Leadership.” He talked about the mentors in his life and what they taught him that applies to our profession:

• We can’t wait for leaders.
• We can’t wait for change.
• We must serve society through stewardship.

He was an inspiring speaker and was passionate as he urged the audience that “We can do better.”

Lankes believes:

• Knowledge is created through conversation.
• Libraries are in the Knowledge Business.
• Therefore, libraries are in the conversation business.

He sees librarianship as a noble profession, one where our power is not in the size of our collections, or forged by the items we catalog, but in our impact on the communities and societies we serve. And this power happens through our facilitation of the conversations taking place by our patrons and our communities.

It was a good send off after 3 days of interesting programs!

Today was the day for our presentation of a case study of our facebook LIB100 class last spring. We had submitted a proposal to do this way back in December, even before the class had taken place (Caroline was a collaborator, we were sorry she couldn’t be with us, as she was an important part of the project). We were allotted 70 minutes to share our findings, so were able to provide a fairly in-depth exploration of the history of the ZSR Library Information Literacy Program, the theoretical basis for designing the class the way we did, a detailed discussion of the actual components of the course and a summary of student reactions and perceptions.

We were pleased when we had over 70 people attend the session (which immediately followed a buffet lunch) and see them stay engaged with a high level of interest in our topic.

My other big event of the day was a meeting with the 2009 LITA National Forum Planning Committee. I’ll be working with a stellar group of colleagues to put together the conference that will be held next Oct. 1-4 in Salt Lake City. This will be my first experience in this type of committee and I look forward to the involvement.

The day had a great ending, with Erik leading the way to Mt. Adams which he discovered early this morning on a run. It was a quaint little town high above the city with shops and restaurants and a magnificent view of the Cincinnati skyline. The little town was bustling with activity and we found an excellent Thai restaurant to dine in.

An early direct flight (who knew they still exist?) landed Erik and me in Cincinnati before breakfast. The trip began with a most interesting shuttle trip from the airport where the driver (who was about 80), immediately took us off the interstate onto a scenic mountainous, winding, trecherous road that followed the Ohio River on the Kentucky side. We traveled through 5 different little river towns, and were treated to a running travelogue, complete with jokes. The conference didn’t start until after lunch, and neither of our rooms were ready, so we set off to explore the downtown Cincinnati area. We found a suspension bridge designed by the engineer who used it as a prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge, an unusually shaped condominum building designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect doing the World Trade Center, and a very lovely riverfront park at Sawyer Point.

After lunch, it was down to business, however, it was a bit disorienting to be at a techie conference that doesn’t provide any wireless options, free or otherwise. For the LITA bloggers they had a table set up at the rear of the room that was hard wired!

The opening keynote, by Tim Spaulding from LibraryThing was interesting mainly because I have never used or explored it. He has taken his product to a high level social experience with social cataloging. He told the audience that LibraryThing is now larger than LOC, but allowed that LOC doesn’t have 256 different JK Rowling titles (which is a prime example of the outcome of democracy of social cataloging to me). He spent quite awhile discussing the tagging in LibraryThing. There are 41 million tags now. There are tag mirrors (which shows what tags other people have placed on the books in your catalog), Tag Mash (which combines individual tags for a most exact hit on the meaning: ie romance zombies), and a common knowledge feature that captures things a tradition catalog wouldn’t: who are the most important characters in the book).

The first concurrent session I attended was given by two women (Gretchen Gueguen and Ann Hanlon) who worked with the digitization initiatives at University of Maryland (and knew Jennifer Roper). Neither is still at UMd and one of them (Gretchen) is now at East Carolina. Their talk was “Crowdsourcing Digitization: Harnessing Workflow to Increase Ouput.” They talked about the issues they faced getting Maryland’s large scale, decentralized scanning initiatives under control. They faced many of the types of decisions that we have been faced with in our Digital Forsyth project. The “crowdsourcing” idea speaks to their decision to go with the “wisdom of crowds”, in this case that of patrons and co-wokers. Utimately, they moved to a user driven model to direct their selection of what to digitize rather than preselecting “trophy” collections to showcase. This means they are digitizing those materials that are requested by patron researchers rather than digitizing and then hoping folks will use what they digitize. Now that Gretchen has moved to East Carolina, they are doing the same approach. She showed a screenshot of Joyner’s forthcoming newest collection that contains many of the same features you see in Digital Forsyth including tag clouds and facets. It would be worthwhile to plan a field trip to exchange ideas, don’t you all think?

I joined Erik for the second concurrent session on “Reswizzling the IT Enterprise for the Next Generation” where NC State’s Maurice York talked about how they have restructured their IT operation to be more effective to their customers (over 250 staff with over 700 computers to manage, plus all the servers, services etc. you might expect from NC State). We were both tickled to hear Maurice talk about instituting Service Level Agreements, much like our WFU friends in IS are doing. I wish him luck with that one. The main value of this session for me was that it affirmed that, even on our smaller scale operation, we face the same complexities and challenges to properly serve all of our customers and manage your expectations. There were some good ideas that Erik and his group might try as more and more projects and technologies come our way!

The day ended with a “vendor showcase” reception. LITA has a very small vendor presence compared to many other conferences (maybe 6-8 tables), but there was good conversation between colleagues and roasted veggies, mashed potatoes (a strange addition to an appetizer type party) and other good food.

Today, our presentation is right after lunch, so we’ll report back this evening on how that went!

In late July, early August I attended a three week e-learning course hosted by ACRL titled “Copyright and The Library, Part 1: The Basics Including Fair Use.” In addition to discussion board postings and online readings, class members participated in weekly homework and library assessment assignments, audio lectures, and question and answer AIM sessions. I have summarized the basics of the copyright law and sections that pertain to libraries below.

Summary

The copyright law and code is found under Title 17 of the United States Code and is broken into several sections that affect libraries and archives.

• Section 101: Definitions of terms commonly used throughout copyright law and sections
• Section 106: Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works
• Section 107: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Fair Use
• Section 108: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Reproductions by Libraries and Archives
• Section 109: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Effect of Transfer of Particular Copy or Phonorecord
• Section 504(a)(b)(c): Remedies for Infringement and Damages

Categories of Works of Authorship include:

• Literary works (including computer programs)
• Musical works (non-dramatic)
• Dramatic works (including music)
• Pantomimes/Choreographic works
• Pictorial/graphic/sculptural
• Motion pictures and other AV materials
• Sound recordings
• Architectural works
• Compilations/collective and derivative works
• Three requirements for copyright to attach to a work:
• Must be original
• Work of Authorship
• Fixed in a tangible medium

Exclusive Rights:

The owner of a copyright has the exclusive rights to do and authorize the following:

• Reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords
• Distribute copies or phonorecords to the public by sale or transfer of ownership (by rental, lease, or lending)
• Prepare derivative works based on the original copyrighted work
• Perform the copyrighted work (in the case of literary, musical, pantomime, choreographic, motion picture, or any audio-visual work)
• Display the copyrighted work (in the case of literary, musical, pantomime, choreographic, motion picture, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, or any audio-visual work)
• Perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission (in the case of sound recordings)

Fair Use and the Four Factors:

A copyrighted work may be used without the permission of the copyright holder if its use meets the four factors of Fair Use.The Four Factors, that are mandatory, include:

1. The purpose of and character of the use of the copyrighted work is non-commercial vs. commercial, substitute/superseding vs. transformative.
   1. Is the use of the copyrighted work for commercial gain, to substitute paying for an original
2. The nature of the copyrighted work with regards to published/unpublished, thick/thin
   1. Unpublished works are still open to Fair Use but tend to be a little more protected by the Government through Orphan Works rights
   2. Thick/thin argument-if the work is a newspaper that is being used, Fair Use can be applied since the majority of a newspaper issues is factual information with a minor amount of “original work”
3. The amount and substantiality of the work taken
   1. Quantitative-how much of the copyrighted work is being used
   2. Qualitative-what is being used of the copyrighted work
   3. Will the amount of the work taken impact the quality of the work/will the amount taken impact the market?
4. The effect of the use of the work on potential markets or the value of the work is evaluated by primary, secondary, derivative and educational markets.
   1. While the use of a copyrighted work may not directly impact the primary market or value, misuse under Fair Use can affect secondary or derivative markets and values.
   2. Infringement of work may not directly affect a journal subscription but its use would affect the secondary market of individual article downloads offered by the journal publisher

Types of Copyright Infringement:

Direct Infringement (Primary Liability)

• Direct infringement must be established before secondary infringement can be determined
• “ignorance of the law” is not an excuse in defining direct infringement, but can be used when determining/setting penalties
• EXAMPLE: the student who knowingly photocopied a copyrighted material.

Contributory Infringement (Secondary Liability)

• definition based on CONDUCT
• Definition includes intermediary causes or substantially contributed to the direct infringement OR knows of the infringing nature of the copyrighted material
• Courts typically examine the guidelines of Fair Use before determining contributory infringement occurred.
• EXAMPLE: in academic settings, contributory infringers are students pirating movies, illegally downloading audio files, plagiarized text.

Vicarious Infringement (Secondary Liability)

• Definition based on RELATIONSHIP
• An intermediary has ability to control the conduct of the direct infringer AND receives direct financial gain from the activity of infringement.
• EXAMPLE: a faculty member has a student copy book chapters/journal articles for a workbook, then sells that workbook to his/her enrolled students.

Trials:

There are two types of trials for cases of copyright infringement and the type is established by copyright owner.Copyright cases can either be handled as a bench trial by a judge OR a jury trial of peers.

Damages:

Once the Court has determined and identified all actors of infringement and their liability roles, the next step is setting damages.Although you may be identified as a direct, contributory, or vicarious infringer, you can impact the amount or cost of damaged enforced.

Damages

• Actual financial damages suffered by the copyright holder (any profit made on part of the infringer)
• Ranges from $750.00 to $30,000.00 per infringing work, NOT per copy

Injunctive Relief

• Acts a probationary period before monetary damages are enforced; includes cease and desist orders, seizure and destruction of infringing material, and disabling access.
• If above actions are not taken or enforced, then monetary penalties will be set and imposed.

Fees

• Instead of damages or injunctive relief, courts may only impose court costs and attorney fees
• Fees are set at the discretion of the court, not by a jury or prosecutor
• Typically these fees are NOT cheap

Penalty Enhancement

• Court can enhance the penalties imposed for “willful violations” and “reckless disregard for the law” meaning ignoring cease and desist orders, infringement notices…etc.
• Enhancement fees enforced can be as high as $150,000.00

Miscellaneous-ness:

U.S.C. section 507: The statute of limitations for any copyright infringement is 3 years for civil actions and 5 years for criminal actions.Criminal actions are defined as “actual intent” of infringement such as bootlegging movies for profit.

U.S.C. section 408: Before a copyright lawsuit can be filed a work must be registered.However, registration is no longer required under law; it is permissive, not a prerequisite.

U.S.C. section 410(c): A work can be registered within 5 years of publication and the validity of copyright is considered “prima facie” evidence when used in copyright cases.

U.S.C. section 411 and 412: Registration.Although registration of a published work is no longer required, it is a prerequisite to infringement litigation.For unpublished works, registration must occur before infringement AND within 3 months of publication in order to gain statutory damages and/or attorney’s fees.

For additional readings:

Crews, Kenneth and Georgia Harper. “The Immunity Dilemma: Are State Colleges and Universities Still Liable for Copyright Infringements?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Vol. 50(1999): 1250-1352.

Burningham, Bradd. “Copyright Premissions: A Pilot Project to Determine Costs, Procedures, and Staffing Requirements.” Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Information Supply. Vol. 11(2000): 95-111.

Circular 21

Today the conference went until noon but you could see that many people had already headed for the airport. However, there was still a good deal of information conveyed to those of us who stuck it out (also door prizes at the final general session, must be present to win - no, I didn’t….)

Things started out early with several people presenting their projects via a poster session. Subjects ranged from adventures in digitization to turning technophobes into technophiles. As you might expect, the booths with the most action were the ones that were giving away candy!

There was only one set of concurrent sessions today, so I split my time between two of them. The first one reported on a locally developed Workflow Management System, designed to ingest metadata and digital objects into Fedora, Rutgers’ digital object repository. The speaker was Mary Beth Weber who leads the metadata work group for this IMLS grant-funded project that is charged with building a NJ statewide repository. The system will soon be open source (by 2008) and was of interest to me because it is the type of system that would be useful in Digital Forsyth. As we are doing through an Access database developed by Erik and Kevin, this system tracks the life of a digital objects from their birth (at scanning) to their ingestion into a digital management system. Whether it may have some future value to us, I can’t tell at this point, but we will keep an eye on how it progresses.

I caught the second half of a session by David Lindahl and Nancy Fried Foster from University of Rochester. She reported on user-centered research conducted at their institution. Some of the results have recently been published in an ACRL monograph titled: Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Since I didn’t arrive until after her portion, I’m glad I’ll be able to see the results that are reported in the book. Lindahl talked about a grant-funded project to build The Extensible Catalog, an open source system that will be used as the front end to a library’s ILS (user interface).

The final closing session was given by Jeremy Frumkin from Oregon State University who talked about “In Our Cages with Golden Bars”. The overall theme was how we can think differently about how we pursue what we do with technology in libraries. We are often limited by our own traditions, expertise and experiences. He suggests that librarians can step outside (of their golden bar cages) without throwing away the things that libraries have always done. He used the same themes that we had heard throughout the weekend (all probably at every library conference any of us have attended in the past year): what has to be done to meet our next generation of users, still providing traditional services but remixing them in a way that will insure that libraries remain sticky (from www.2020systems.com: “A term used to describe a web site on which visitors stay at for longer than normal. This is often due to the variety of content and features offered to the visitor which prevents them from needing to go elsewhere for more information”). He talking specifically about a project his library is working on: LibraryFind. It’s a metasearch tool, one that they have prominently displayed from their website. He also presented two other main themes: He believes that our business model has to change to one where libraries and vendors work together to find a mutual advantage that works for both while giving users what they want/need. He also believes that we (as in libraries as a group) need to find a way to brand our services/product so that users can find consistency from one library to the next. He likened this to the fact that pre-automation, a library patron could learn to use the card catalog at one library and be assured that this knowledge was transferable at any other library that he might visit. That certainly isn’t the case today and it leaves users without a sense of the collective identity of “library.” The presentation combined some popular user-centered themes and future thinking along with a dab of practical applications. It was a good solid end to the conference.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport now, waiting to head home in about an hour. It’s been a packed 3 days that, overall, have been well worth coping with air travel these days (We’ll see if I still think that tomorrow morning).

The day’s general session was much more in line with my expectations. David King, Digital Branch and Services Manager at Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas gave an engaging talk about “Change, Library 2.0, and Emerging Trends”. He identified what he considers the major transformations that have taken place in libraries since the advent of the web: commenting (old way: letter from a patron; new: blog replies from patrons), friending (old: no good parallel; new: facebook, myspace), content (old: printed pathfinders; new:staff and patron generated) , tagging (old: catalogers; new: user generated) and mashups (a new concept). He talked about why we should let go of the past and should jump on the bandwagon with these technologies. He doesn’t think that fear of learning new technology should be a reason to ignore these trends - sometimes we have to do something scary to remain relevant. Being relevant is essential to libraries’ futures; as we all know, if we aren’t our users will turn elsewhere. One of the many examples King cited during the talk had to do with a project conducted by the National Library of New Zealand where they asked conference participants to complete the sentence “In 2017 libraries will be……” and then posted the 200 responses on Flickr.

The conference provided lunch for everyone and this was a good opportunity to network with those sitting together. I ran into Andy Morton who is still at University of Richmond. He was with Nancy Woodall who I had never met but who I’ve talked with over the years when we’ve been doing various technology projects. They were also an Endeavor site and it was interesting to hear what their reaction has been to the migration to ExLibris. I also met a couple librarians from East Carolina who talked about their first gaming event (they had Giz come out and present to them on our gaming experience). They said that they had over 200 kids show up!

Just a brief note about Denver this weekend. It turns out that it is one of the busiest event weekends in their history. There was a Columbus Day Parade (83 protesters were arrested), the Colorado Rockies played (and won) against the Phillies to win an NCLS spot in the playoffs, Octoberfest, Denver Arts Weeks, the largest Susan B. Komen race (today), a Genesis concert….Well, you get the picture. This translated to an expected weekend downtown crowd of over 80,000 people. So it was a no-brainer to head to the 16th St. Mall (2 blocks away) to people watch after the day’s sessions ended.

There are sessions through noon today, so I’m off to see poster sessions, another concurrent session and a closing general session. Then off to the airport and home by midnight!