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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Strategic Planning 2.0

Published by Iris on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

After our rousing success with the vision statement meeting (posted on here and here), the entire library staff got together to discuss our three-year strategic plan. I’ll admit, I was worried. We’ve had a lot of meetings lately and it’s getting a little old. But we somehow managed to discuss the strategic plan for an hour and a half, make significant process, and not end up hating the process, our co-workers, or the plan itself. (The scones and fruit waiting on the staff-room table helped keep us all focused.) Note that this does NOT mean that I hope we have all-staff meetings every other week! However, if we do have all-staff meetings, they should be like this one and the visioning meeting. They were successful because there was something to do, a plan for getting it done, collective and collaborative work toward doing it, and we stopped the meeting when it was done. These simple rules should apply for all meetings, please!

What do I like so much about this strategic plan? Well, it begins with an introductory statement which grew out of our discussion about the vision statement. We were burning with enthusiasm for the growing role the library will play in collecting, organizing, housing, and aiding in the discovery of not only text but also data, images, media, etc. And we were very excited about providing access to content regardless of format. Unfortunately, this excitement originally eclipsed any mention of text and content. So our Strategic Plan, as it is drafted at the moment, tries to bridge the old and the new in a much more constructive manner. It also includes specific affirmations of experimentation, not for experimentation’s sake, but in response to user need and with the recognition that not everything will work as planned.

Here are some of the specific pieces of the plan that really struck me:

  • Experiment with new approaches to services, technologies, professional development, space, and furnishings to respond to user needs.
  • Experiment with tools and interfaces that move us towards the goal of seamless access to a broad scope of distributed information resources and customizable views of information space.
  • Secure grant funding to experiment with selection, acquisition, organization, and providing access to data, sound and image resources, and other digital content as needed by faculty and students.
  • Widen the campus discussion of the future of scholarly communication and publishing and help develop a better understanding of their implications for the role of libraries.

There are three pages of bullet points… but you get the idea.

Since this meeting, we’ve learned that our strategic plan will have to remain in draft form until next fall (yikes!) when it can be vetted by some departments that are too busy right now to look at it.

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Copyright: The Right to Pull Your Hair Out and Scream

Published by Iris on Monday, May 1st, 2006

As well as the committee charged with choosing a course management system for our campus (no new news to report just yet… still banging head against wall), I’m also on a committee that’s drafting a copyright policy and educational material about copyright for our campus. And now we’re stuck (again) because we’ve got a nice little policy that’s going before the admin council tomorrow morning, and we’ve got a nice little collection of educational material and decision aids, but now it turns out that the faculty really don’t want to know how to comply with the law. They want us to set up an office on campus that’ll do it for them. And I can TOTALLY sympathize. I wouldn’t want to wade through this on a regular basis, either, if someone else would do it for me. There are only two problems with this plan: it would reduce the purview of fair use, and it would be impossible to set up.

It would reduce fair use because an office of this type simply could not weigh the four factors effectively. This means that, when in doubt (which would be most of the time), they would have to err on the side of not getting sued, so they would become very quick to seek and pay for permission. As soon as you pay for a use that could have been fair, you’ve effectively increased the market for that work, and future uses would therefore be less fair. Fair use absolutely atrophies if no one exercises it. In the long run, this would increase the cost of copying, because more uses would require payment for permission. So if you need a bottom-line reason as well as a philosophical one there it is.

Even if we decided that this didn’t matter to us, there’s the whole impossibility of setting up such an outfit. We won’t get more staff to run this thing, and I imagine that even if we were funded and permitted to hire a whole office, we’d have a hard time recruiting copyright whipping-boys-and-girls.

So what can we do? We absolutely have to make compliance as easy as possible or no one will pay attention. But fair use, by far the most crucial and precious part of the whole operation, can only be deployed effectively by well-informed individuals who are weighing uses on a case-by-case basis.

Not only that, but our recent talks with faculty have revealed universal surprise that the library wasn’t checking up on the copyright status of everything being brought in and put on reserve even though it’s stated very clearly on everything we send out every term that it is up to the professor to check this and deliver copyright-cleared copies to us. Clearly, the message just isn’t clear enough or getting to our users at their point of need. Maybe a standard required waiver asking them to check either the box that says this is fair use or the box that says they’ve received permission, followed by a signature? It’s something to consider.

And may I just point out that citing and proper attribution have NOTHING to do with copyright. Aside from who, exactly, is supposed to insure that we’re all following copyright law, this seems to be the single greatest source of confusion on campus. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard earnest and well-meaning professors, students, and staff tell me how much our educational materials are needed because so many people out there put together PowerPoint presentations or class papers that include images without attribution… You can cite every word, image, or sound and still be in violation of copyright law. You just won’t also be guilty of plagiarism.

While I’m on the subject, guidelines such as the Classroom Guidelines seem wonderful and helpful, but they aren’t failsafes, and they aren’t the law. Believe it or not, there’s no clause in the copyright law that mentions 10% of a book or the idea that you get one free use but have to pay after that. You can still get sued if you use less than 10%, and frequently you’d be just fine using more than 10%. Weighing the four factors is the only way to know for sure. (Luckily the University of Minnesota has created a tool that can help walk you through the four factors. We use it all the time at our college. Thanks UMN!)

Well, that’s enough screaming and pulling-of-hair for one night.

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