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Month: June 2007

The Problem of the Younger Generation

Published by Iris on Sunday, June 17th, 2007

I O.D.ed on millennial generalizations after only three professional conferences and meetings last year and have since consciously avoided sessions about those crazy aliens we’ve spawned. So maybe I’m not educated enough on the topic to have an authoritative opinion. But that doesn’t stop me having a non-authoritative opinion, and here it is: throughout all of history, the younger generation has always been alien.

“But their brains operate differently,” you say.

“How do you know?” I reply. “How many generations of kids have had their brains scanned?”

Well, TCM is playing the 1968 movie “The Impossible Years” right now and guess what, it’s all about how teens are wired differently and how teens and adults are completely incomprehensible to each other. The mother in this film just told the incredulous dad, “And what do you suppose our daughter is doing right now? She’s reading.” Nobody can believe it. They think it’s a miracle. And yes, I said the movie was from 1968.

So the specific differences between adult and kid may differ from year to year and from research study to research study, not to mention from specific adult to specific adult and specific kid to specific kid. But the younger generation is always alien… and this is completely natural.

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Anniversaries

Published by Iris on Saturday, June 16th, 2007

I just realized that today marks my second anniversary as a librarian at Carleton (and, incidentally, it’s also my co-worker’s birthday). It’s incredibly cliche, but it feels simultaneously like I’ve been here a couple of months and a couple of lifetimes.

Anniversaries are strange things. They make me all gushy about the good times, but they also remind me how hard those first months were. And somehow it’s the memories of those first months that are dominating my thoughts this morning, months when I’d work hard and then come home and feel every single one of the 330 miles between me and everything I knew. And even now, two years later, I still miss my family every single day.

Moving here was one of the harder things I’ve done in my life. But I’m glad I talked myself into it because I could never have asked for a better job, better co-workers, or a better supervisor. It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d somewhat accidentally landed in the dream job I hadn’t known I wanted.

So yes, anniversaries are strange things. I wonder what next year’s will feel like, and what new experiences I’ll have between now and then.

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Reunion Weekend

Published by Iris on Friday, June 15th, 2007

Over 2000 alums are here this weekend for the annual reunion festivities. 2000 may not sound like a lot to some people, but when you consider that it’s just over the number of students we support each year, you can get a sense of how full the campus seems at the moment.

Here in the library (one of the few air conditioned buildings on campus on this very hot day, by the way) it’s been fun to see people’s reactions to the various renovations that have occurred over the past 15 or so years. And there’s been a pretty steady stream of alums into my office asking everything from “where’s the bathroom” to “where’s such and such a collection that was donated 18 years ago.”

Now, it should be noted that I’m not the librarian on call for questions today, but I am the only one here who’s door is open and who’s door is near the reference desk, the stairs, and the elevator. Next to mine is the office of a librarian who’s on vacation today, and next to hers is the office of a co-worker who’s also an alumna and who’s doing the whole reunion thing this year. Next year, I should just take today as my day on call.

But I’m not actually complaining. I love reunion weekend. Every year I think I won’t (don’t know quite why), and every year I end up having a blast.

Meanwhile, the college archivist has set up shop in the Athenaeum (our gathering/presentation space here in the library, and also the room that houses works written by Carleton people). He’s collecting oral histories today and generally having a grand old time. Every year at this time he becomes one of the most valuable employees here. He’s pretty much the only one who can talk to the two or three people from the class of ’37 as if he’d been there. He teaches people about their time here, and he soaks in the experiences and memories of generations of alums. I keep seeing him walk past my office toward the elevator carrying boxes of photos and letters and other memorabilia to be added to his collection. What fun.

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Navigating Copyright Agreements

Published by Iris on Thursday, June 14th, 2007

I’ve been learning more and more about copyright ever since I landed in the group on campus that wrote our copyright policy. But I’ve almost exclusively learned about copyright from the content user’s perspective rather than the content creator’s perspective. Well, lately I’ve begun to learn about that other side of copyright law.

A few months ago I was asked to write a chapter for an upcoming ACRL publication. Right away I asked, “Can I have a co-author, and can we put our finished product into our institutional repository?” The answers came back in the affirmative, which was very encouraging all around.

Then we got our copyright agreements in the mail and the cover letter said, “This form grants you the copyright to your work, allows you to use your work elsewhere after the original publication, and allows deposit in your institutional repository.” Woohoo! But….

The agreement itself said, “…. the Author hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher … all copyrights therein or relating thereto…” Hmmmm…

Further down, the agreement says that “Publisher hereby grants to Author a royalty-free license to publish the Work in any book of which the Author is the author or editor, provided the Work is identified as having first been published in the original publication cited above. The Publisher also grants to the Author the right to file the work in their institutional repository.” So that’s very, very nice, but it’s not the same as keeping our copyrights.

So, after talking it over with some people in the LSW chat room, I asked the publisher if I’d gotten the right agreement. It’s been known to happen that there is more than one possible agreement and that the author receives the wrong one.

But it turns out I got the right one. ACRL’s response was very encouraging, though. They said they’ve never been asked about this before and wondered what would be better. So I suggested removing that bit about “you get to keep your copyrights” from the cover letter, and then adding a clause saying that copyrights revert to authors X number of months or years after the book officially goes out of print. Sound reasonable? I hope they think so.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to our copyright group on campus that we should add a “what to think about before you sign away your rights” facet to our copyright training.

[Update: It looks like ACRL thinks this is reasonable! They are even thinking of asking their lawyers to draw up something even more permissive.]

[Update 2: They’re thinking of making the agreement explicit that they own the copyright, but we get to use the work in any old way we want as long as we cite it as having been published first in this ACRL volume. Sounds wonderful to me!]

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