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Month: February 2009

Strolling Across Campus

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Tonight was the second meeting of a faculty/staff book group that’s reading the Odyssey together. We sit in the well appointed living room of a campus-owned guest house, sip wine, eat hors d’oeuvres, and discuss this book with the added benefit that the man leading the book group is a classicist. It’s pretty much an ideal way to spend one evening every couple of weeks.

With my head full of heroic happenings and the memories of good conversation, I walked back across campus to the library. In one lighted window there were two students stooping close to a microscope. In another lighted window, someone bent over a piano’s keyboard and sent peeling scales out into the night. In the middle of campus, laughing students played hockey on the ice rink while their friends cheered them on. A student stopped me to see if I had time to meet with her tomorrow.

And I realized that my schooling from infancy onward has primed me to love this atmosphere of communal learning and exploration. I love being among people who think it’s normal to probe deeply, value probable and improbable connections equally as long as the reasoning behind them is clear, and start conversations with “So, that reading we had yesterday. Do you think…”

I realize that this isn’t the only way to live. I realize that for some it’s irrelevant to the point of laughability. But this is where I feel at home. Here, in this kind of environment, and among people like this, my own interests and questions and quirks and day dreams come alive. This is where I belong.

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The Obama Drama that Interests Me The Most

Published by Iris on Saturday, February 7th, 2009

I have no idea how to fix the current economic crisis, create peace in the Middle East, or make sure everyone gets health insurance. I listen to the news pretty passively, hoping that the Powers That Be make good decisions on my behalf, since there’s no way I’d be able to make these decisions with any confidence of success. So while events of great magnitude wash over me day in and day out, what sticks? What do I go back to at the end of the day and ask Google for updates that I may have missed? Obama’s Blackberry.

It had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to use one while off being president. It seemed like the perfect accessory to a presidential suit. Who knew that it would have such security ramifications? Who knew that it would spark debate about the kinds of filtered information top leaders get, and what this will mean for historians of the future? Fascinating!!

As long as he doesn’t do what one rather thoughtless congressman did, I’m thrilled that he’s got a new spy-proof Blackberry (or, as I like to think about it, the First Crackberry).

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This I Believe: Copyright policies as an exercise in good faith

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 5th, 2009

I’ve been working on a document that lays out the rationale for our electronic reserves policies as they relate to copyright. And as I did so, I realized that it’s hard to write such documents without using the phrase “we believe.” I found myself systematically going back through my drafts and notes looking for ways to rephrase things so that it reads less like a statement of belief and more like informed decisions. Systematically removing words and phrases from drafts can be tedious, but this time it was fascinating because it foregrounded just how much the act of interpreting copyright law relies on good faith efforts to make sense of antiquated, misunderstood, emotionally charged, vague, and tangled laws.

This is even more the case when making sense of the law as it applies to electronic reserves. Reserve services are governed by Section 107 (the “Fair Use” section).* Unfortunately, one of the best ways to know if any particular interpretation of Fair Use is correct is to see how court cases have handled that issue, and no court cases have yet dealt with electronic reserves.** This means that libraries everywhere have to make one fundamental decision without guidance from the courts: are electronic reserves more like coursepacks or more like print reserves? The former assumes an element of commerce in the creating and selling of the coursepack that isn’t present in electronic reserves, but offers the slim comfort that the creation of coursepacks has been tested in the courts.*** The latter builds on the idea of extending easy access to a subset of the library’s collections to a particular population of students, but it leaves libraries with no legal precedent to lean on.

And having decided between these two options, libraries then have to make a whole host of related decisions about how far Fair Use extends, what mechanisms should be in place to guard against copyright infringement, and how to make sure that all of this stays out of the way of the students’ learning experience as much as possible. All of this with only legal analogy, not legal precedent, as a guide.

Is it any wonder, then, that documents explaining the rationale behind our policies are more statements of belief than they are statements of fact?

This I believe: electronic reserves are not coursepacks. Yet they are copies of original articles and must therefore undergo the Four Factor test for each and every article, each and every time they are used. I also know that Fair Use was invented with education in mind, and therefore I believe we should weigh those Four Factors with confidence in the knowledge that they were laid out for us, that they are speaking to us, and that they are not grasses laid over legal snares that are lurking, waiting to torture us and demand our first-born children in payment for unforeseen infringement.

* Unfortunately, neither Section 108 (provisions for library copying) nor Section 109 (the “Doctrine of First Sale”) apply to electronic reserves. If they did, things would probably be a lot clearer cut.

** A case against Georgia State University is still in the works.

*** See the first two cases listed here.

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