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Pegasus Librarian Posts

More Copyright Woes

Published by Iris on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

Just as I’m lamenting the current state of Copyright Law, I hear from News.com that Congress, in it’s infinite wisdom, is drafting a revision to current law that would make things much, much worse. If the new draft becomes law, it will become a crime to intend to violate copyright protections. That just smells of Big Brother…

Here’s what the news article says about other changes in the law:

The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following:

  • Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating “advanced tools of forensic science to investigate” copyright crimes.
  • Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
  • • Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
  • • Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be “destroyed” or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws.
  • Says copyright holders can impound “records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in” infringements.

Just when I think it can’t get worse…

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Google’s Logo Questioned

Published by Iris on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

This post, Digitization 101: Google and copyright (moral rights), and in this one, Diglet: Google Takes Down Miro Logo Art, each reference a Mercury News article that makes me fear for this nation’s ability to do creative work.

Last week Google put up one of their signature logo-morphs that honored the artist Joan Miro, who’s family promptly requested that Google remove the altered logo because:

“There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miro, and they are putting it up without having the rights,” said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society. (see the Mercury News article)

Now, I’m not a copyright lawyer by any means, so I may be way off base here, but I find it very hard to believe that this logo infringed on Miro’s family’s rights in any way. First off, this work was transformative more than derivative. It certainly didn’t reduce the market value of the original, and it could even have increased interest in the original. In fact, the use seems to fall squarely within the language of Section 107 (the fair use section) of the US Code. This seems to be comment, or even news reporting, more than anything else.

If this is infringing, creative work over the next decades will be smothered to death.

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Choosing a Course Management System… The Saga Continues

Published by Iris on Monday, April 24th, 2006

Last term, six professors accepted the challenge to road-test Moodle and Sakai, the two finalists in our quest for a course management system. At the end of the term, each professor and many of their students took surveys. And now a group of IT people, Web department people, library people, and a faculty member are sorting through the survey results to see if they can give us some clues about which system would work best for our campus in the long term.

Unfortunately, after working for a week to analyze only about 55 survey results (ending at 2am last night, I might add), I’ve realized that our job is even bigger than it seemed at first. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t anticipate this, because I haven’t participated in any project yet that hasn’t become much more complex and labor-intensive than seemed possible at the outset. It turns out that we have to cope with several related issues. In addition to testing the functions of each system we are also:

  • comparing the two development communities,
  • analyzing survey responses that give us a lot of useful information but that do not actually answer the questions we asked,
  • charting current pedagogical trends,
  • Grappling with the vaguely-felt, ill-defined, but strongly-supported goals of a “Small Liberal Arts College,”
  • Choosing between at least two divergent ideologies of technological adoption,
  • and last but certainly not least, come up with evaluation criteria and apply those criteria in a way that will appease those who are completely committed to which ever system we decide against.

I am one of the lucky 4 members of this group of evaluators charged with doing the actual evaluation and choosing of the system… heaven help me. I’m not only choosing a system, but I’m also choosing which of two departments on campus I want to continue to interact with on friendly terms for the rest of my career.

If anyone had said that I’d be handed this type of project and responsibility less than one year after getting out of library school, I’d have laughed in their faces. But as it turns out, it seems that I’m pretty good at this committee thing, so I get assigned to a lot of them. If this keeps up I’ll morph from the library liaison to certain academic departments into the library liaison to campus committees.

Related Entry:

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What ARE the goals of a college education? And where’s the librarian?

Published by Iris on Monday, April 24th, 2006

I spent the weekend crunching numbers (in the hopes of being able to make some meaning out of the survey responses in our CMS evaluation project) and reading Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok (the once and current president of Harvard). The CMS eval headache will have to wait for its own post. Let just say “The Saga Continues.” But Bok’s book is fascinating.

As part of his look at the history of colleges and universities in this country and how they’ve arrived at the curricular and pedagogical methods currently in vogue, he points out that most curricular reviews take place in the complete absence of a clear and defined list of goals. Nobody has mapped out what colleges should be teaching their students in the course of four years, or, if they have, the curriculum does not actually support those goals. So Bok lists 8 goals that he thinks are actually actionable as well as being universally important. According to Bok, institutions teaching undergraduates should be teaching:

  • The ability to communicate
  • Critical thinking
  • Moral reasoning
  • Preparation for citizenship
  • Living with diversity
  • Living in a global society
  • Breadth of interest
  • Preparation for work

Of these, he says, teaching “Critical Thinking” is a goal held by the greatest number of faculty.

Nationwide polls have found that more than 90 percent of faculty members in the United States consider it [teaching critical thinking] the most important purpose of undergraduate education. In view of the wide variety of interests and backgrounds represented in a typical college faculty, such a strong consensus is impressive (pages 67-68).

But what constitutes critical thinking? See if you can see the librarian’s role in this list of skills from page 68 of Bok’s book.

…an ability to reorganize and define problems clearly, to identify the arguments and interests on all sides of an issues, to gather relevant facts and appreciate their relevance, to perceive as many plausible solutions as possible, and to exercise good judgment in choosing the best of these alternatives after considering the evidence and using inference, analogy, and other forms of ordinary reasoning to test the cogency of the arguments.

After reading this list and recognizing in it those ACRL information literacy standards that just haven’t been resonating with my faculty, I began to wonder why librarians have chosen to develop their own jargonized definition of a habit of mind that faculty obviously feel very strongly about. Why can’t we draw upon the vocabulary that faculty are already using to show that developing sophisticated student scholarship (which is the classroom interpretation of information literacy) is part of critical thinking? Why can’t we make an argument for integrating this type of critical thinking into curriculum because it is the content faculty are teaching rather than something extra that has to be crammed into syllabi? So far, I’ve been able to “convert” one faculty member to this view… only 200 or so more to go.

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