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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Licensing Permissions from the CCC

Published by Iris on Friday, July 6th, 2007

For the two or three of you that haven’t heard, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has decided to license permissions to copyrighted material (note that on the left-hand side of that screen you can read an overview of the license itself in PDF). They say that this will be convenient (well yeah, you’ve already paid) and that you’ll gain “confidence” and “peace of mind.”

As much as I hate to say it, I think they’ll gain a lot of customers on those last two points alone. Nothing makes people squirm as much as copyright permissions. Everyone always doubts their fair use analysis and forgets that “multiple copies for classroom use” is written right into the fair use clause of the law.

But why might you not want to sign up for that license? James Boyle of the Financial Times has a great piece on that, as does Peter Hirtle of the LibraryLaw blog (his analysis is here). In short, here are the key issues as I see them (both of which figure large in Hirtle’s post):

  • Paying for permission when you don’t have to erodes fair use arguments in the future by increasing the market value of the work.
  • Permissions come in many shapes and sizes. What is the use of licensing permissions from the CCC when we already pay licensing fees from databases, for example?

I would hate to see my library go this route, especially since I imaging that the CCC fee structures are based on a fairly -er- “optimistic” interpretation of fair use. And yet I feel sympathy for libraries that either don’t have the staff to go through the permissions process, or don’t have the training to determine fair use on their own.

At the same time, just writing that last sentence makes me feel like I’ve just said, “It’s just too bad some kids don’t have the wherewithal to learn to read…” I recognize that licensing will be an attractive option, but I think it’ll cripple us.

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Thinking about the Future of the Catalog: MnObe Moving Forward

Published by Iris on Friday, July 6th, 2007

For the last year and a half, the five liberal arts colleges known as MnObe (pronounced min-OH-bee and derived from Minnesota Oberlin Group Libraries) have been thinking collectively about our library catalogs. We started at very different points (ranging from “what we’ve got works pretty well” to “what is this thing we’re using and where are the punch-card computers it seems to match?”). Then Roy Tennant came and talked to us and everybody got pretty excited about the idea of a next generation catalog. And I was pretty sure we’d stay that way… excited about the idea of change.

But then we held a “debate” between five teams of librarians each proposing an alternative to our current systems. Our biggest surprise that day was the amount of agreement between groups and audience members about a) the need for change and b) the types of things that need to change. (Here’s a quick list of features and functions we liked, none of which are surprising.) At the conclusion of that meeting, the directors of our libraries charged a group of volunteers to actually map out our movement forward.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, this group of volunteers met, thought, discussed, and drafted a report. You can read it on the wiki if you want, or the PDF (which is prettier). It’s definitely a first step, but the group felt that we needed to clear up the first step first. You’ll notice, though, that we clearly and explicitly state that we want some kind of drastic change in the near future, and we map out a few key actions that will start us moving toward that change.

Now it’s been delivered to the MnObe directors. We’ll see what happens. I’m having to work a lot harder to keep from getting too excited now that we’ve actually formally recommended action.

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Outing Myself

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Well, I finally decided to put a link to my blog from my professional web site. I’d been laboring under the delusion that taking this step would send students flooding to my blog where they would read things like “Wow, I really dropped the ball on that class.” Surely you can understand why that might make me pause. But then I realized that students only visit my calendar page. They don’t care what committees I’m on, or the presentations I’ve given, or the papers I’ve written. So I buried the link at the very bottom of that boring page.

Which begs the question, why link at all if I put it in a place that nobody is likely to see? The short answer is, I don’t know. I guess now I can pretend to myself that I’m not hiding this little project from the people I work with every day. But really nothing has changed.

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Firefox Search Plugins for All

Published by Iris on Thursday, July 5th, 2007

One of my co-workers has started experimenting with custom search plugins for Firefox. So far she has several ready to go, and they’re listed on her site. Searching our catalog and A to Z list right from the browser are my two favorites.

She made these using SearchPlugins.net, which apparently makes creation, editing, and other maintenance of plugins pretty easy.

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