ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use

Late in January, the Association of Research Libraries released the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use."  As the email from Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives  for ARL said:

After two years of painstaking (and really fun!) work learning from librarians about the challenges they face and the fair use solutions they favor, we are proud to release a Code that synthesizes all that info into one simple, readable, flexible document that we hope will help academic and research librarians move forward with important work with a little more courage and conviction than might have been possible yesterday.

As with all these Best Practices projects, this wouldn't have been possible without help from Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi from American University - two scholars who have really made a huge difference in the way ordinary communities apply fair use. Not only did we rely on their pathbreaking work, but we were lucky enough to have them work with us hands on to develop this code and to promote it. And it wouldn't have been possible without generous support in the form of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Now its our turn to read the document and use what they have written! If you already have delved into the document, please feel free to share your thoughts and comments about it on this blog post.