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Soon after I became a Dean of River Campus Library at the University of Rochester
Don Waters of the Mellon Foundation
asked a question which he asked of most university library deans, which is, "What keeps
you up at night?"
And so at the top of my list were questions about copyright and fair use
because really in the library community, with a lot of questions that we have,
we could always,
for example, put out on a listserv
considering something in digital humanities: "Anyone have a job
description to share?" or something like that.
But when it came to copyright and fair use
you put a question like that on the listserv: "What are you doing? What are
your best practices around e-reserves?", for example, you would get deafening
silence because we just knew we could not put that in writing. We couldn't have
conversations
and it was very frustrating 'cause it was such a core piece of what we're
doing and yet we aren't able to share ideas and have conversations.
So when I brought that to Don's attention, he thought that perhaps the Mellon Foundation
could help because
it could serve as a convening body and it could really bring together individuals
to work on this problem
without
causing attention on any one particular institution, which is really
part of the concern
So every other month
the library meets with the university council and we bring to them
the real questions that we're having and we're looking around fair use and copyright.
We look at the law, we look at the code of best practices,
we look at past practice at Yale,
and we think about, on a case-by-case basis, what should we be doing
and we use that discussion to be an opportunity to document our decisions,
to go through the exercise of thinking about fair use,
and hopefully creating what we hope will be
a set of decisions that we can look back on and say, "Why did we make the
decision that we did?" and we can document the fact that it was not just a
random decision
but it is a really thoughtful process,
and hopefully build for us a set of decision-making processes so future
decisions, when we look at a particular collection and think about what we can
or cannot do,
we can look back at our own local
sort of case law, let's say,
and look at our local local case law and
say, "Well, how is this related? How is it similar?"
and not have to sort of reinvent the wheel over and over again. So without the
code
and that as a catalyst I really don't think we would have made as much
progress as
we are now. So we have this process in place and we're meeting every other
month and really starting to pick up some momentum about having these
conversations and it's giving us the vehicle for making decisions around
copyright and fair use
at Yale in the libraries in a way that we just couldn't do before.
We're working with a lot of special collections, for example,
and we're looking at deeds of gifts and we're looking at international law. So
we received a collection from overseas - What did the deed of gift look like?
What does international
copyright law look like?
How might we make a decision about what we can and can't do with that collection?
So that's causing us to say, "Well we have a lot of
ambiguity
in the past
but going forward can establish a new deed of gift that we're comfortable with
and we don't have this ambiguity going forward". So those are sort of two
examples.
Another one
would be
materials again within special collections
that have cultural
sensitivity.
So thinking about audio recordings from forty years ago in the
field
on anthropologist in Africa.
Should we digitize this? Should we make this available to the world? Certainly
those individuals never thought that their voice would ever be heard by the
world.
And so there wasn't that human subjects review piece.
How do we think about that problem, and who should have access and privacy? So
it's a lot of really thorny issues
but at least we feel like now we have a forum to to be discussing it with.
So we're going far beyond what I think the code was focused on
but it became that vehicle. It got us started.
And once we got going, it feels like, well, "Why should we stop here? Why
should we stop with copyright and fair use in a more defined sense?"
Let's think about other intellectual property issues
that are really complicated issues, and let's get started.