The Vera Institute for Justice in New York City has five tip sheets for "Designing Accessible Events for People with Disabilities and Deaf Individuals." This information is important for libraries and every other type of organization that is focused on diversity. The tip sheets are:
Feel free to bookmark these and use them.
As you might imagine, even their brief answers are in-depth! Definitely worth reading.
OCLC announced in January that Lorcan Dempsey was retiring at the end of April. For me, it has seemed like Lorcan had worked at OCLC forever, but that was not true. However, I've seen his impact on OCLC research and have been thrilled to use some of his work, especially Collection Directions: Some Reflections on the Future of Library Collections and Collecting which he wrote with Constance Malpas and Brian Lavoie. And I am thankful for Lorcan's willingness to share his work.
Last year, Lorcan was asked if he "could talk about what [he] valued or found essential for a library student to know." He turned that request into a long, well-written, and meaningful blog post, Advice to an LIS graduate student: reflecting life and career. Yes, the post contains advice as well as stories from his life and career.
I very much appreciate Lorcan's honesty about attending college and his early work and life. He wrote:
I was a college dropout. For several years, I worked in temporary jobs, or, well, sometimes, I did not. This included a spell of over eight months working on a production line in Continental Gummiwerke in Korbach, Germany, as one of a group of Irish gastarbeiters [guest workers].
I think many of us have taken winding routes to this profession, including barriers that we dug under, jumped over, or ran around. Thank you, Lorcan, for putting yours in writing!
Yes, this piece is full of advice, although some of it is tucked in what he says about himself. For example:
I have learned to try never to take anything for granted, and I understand only too well from experience that I do not always have perfect or even very good judgement or intuition. I understand that my background affects how I behave or how I think and importantly how I can seem to others. I always have more to learn, whatever the situation, and it is dangerous to rush to quick judgement.Learning doesn't stop when you finish a degree. Learning must continue! It happens as part of life, but it also must happen intentionally.
IFLA has released an executive summary of a report that it plans to release in advance of May WIPO SCCR/42, the 42nd meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright Relations. The report is "How well did copyright laws serve libraries during COVID-19?" The two-page executive summary is available through the IFLA website.
The abstract below provides highlights that will hopefully cause you to review the entire executive summary and then wait anxiously for the full report. One tidbit that stands out to me is that, "Not all was fine pre-pandemic." We knew that, right? I think it means more when survey results from 29 countries point that out. No, it wasn't just you who felt that it is challenging dealing with copyright. It is everyone. The question is: What needs to change to make it better?
The report involved a survey of 114 libraries worldwide and 28 interviews during February and March 2022. Respondents were from 29 countries.
83% of responding library professionals said they had copyright-related challenges providing materials during pandemic-related facility closures. These intersected with ongoing challenges predating the pandemic, including budget pressures, external financial crises, difficult negotiations with publishers, and demand for eBooks that outpaces publisher offerings. While many publishers offered expanded access to services and content during the early months of the pandemic, these offers usually did not last for sufficient time for libraries to meaningfully integrate them into teaching and research activities. 69% of respondents who had challenges said these included issues providing access to textbooks, and 52% of libraries that had copyright challenges indicated challenges with providing access internationally, as students and faculty returned to their home countries. To access content digitally, some libraries made use of programs such as the HathiTrust's Emergency Temporary Access project and ‘Resource-Sharing during COVID’ (RSCVD). Libraries supporting online classrooms faced legal issues around communicating content at a distance. These included whether it was allowed to play music or films in online class settings, as would have been done during in-person classes, or to record lectures that involved copyrighted material. Laws often leave gray zones which create uncertainty about how content can be shared. This points to the need for clarified legal protections for libraries and the services they offer.
The full report is planned to be released in advance of WIPO SCCR/42, the 42nd meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright Relations. IFLA is looking forward to speaking to libraries’ experiences and advocating for strong limitations and exceptions to support their work delivering services and providing access to content.
American book and journal publishers sold 2.7 billion units in 2014, generating $27.98 billion in net revenue. 1 Meanwhile, libraries in the United States circulate almost twice that amount, engaging in over 4.42 billion circulation transactions a year, 2 most of which are for free.
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Therefore, libraries operate in a space that commerce does not and will not occupy, and the services that libraries provide supplement rather than compete with services that publishers and other commercial intermediaries could offer....
Libraries occupy a privileged space in the copyright system. Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence. History is part of the legislative history of statutes, and it constitutes part of the context that informs the interpretation of current statutes.
In this Article, written for a symposium on the future of libraries in the digital age, I present and challenge two common views about the scope of the first-sale doctrine, or exhaustion: namely, that the doctrine applies only to the transfer of tangible copies of works but not to the transfer of digital files, and that copyright owners can circumvent exhaustion by characterizing transactions as “licenses” rather than “sales”, or by contracting out of it.
The law on digital exhaustion is anything but settled. As codified, the “first sale” doctrine it may limit only the distribution right, but its statutory presence might merely affirm a broader principle of exhaustion—one of the several principles in copyright law that limit the copyright owner’s powers. The principle of exhaustion can apply, and at times has been applied, beyond the distribution right.
Likewise, the notion that copyright owners can circumvention exhaustion by characterizing transactions as “licenses” rather than “sales”, or by using contracts to exercise downstream control is hardly a foregone conclusion. Established precedent and sound legal principle indicate that while the law recognizes some scope for contracting around exhaustion, courts will not necessarily uphold any private reordering of the respective legal entitlements of copyright owners and users.
While these observations and conclusions apply to exhaustion generally, they apply most demonstrably in the case of libraries. Libraries occupy a privileged space in the copyright system. Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence. History is part of the legislative history of statutes, and it constitutes part of the context that informs the interpretation of current statutes.
Therefore, if not false, then the view that the current legislation does not allow digital exhaustion is at least questionable.
Libraries have historically been trusted hubs to equalize access to credible information, a crucial role that they should continue to fill in the digital age. However, as more information is born-digital, digitized, or digital-first, libraries must build new policy, legal and public understandings about how advances in technology impact our preservation, community, and collection development practices.
This panel brought together legal scholars Ariel Katz (University of Toronto) and Argyri Panezi (IE University Madrid/Stanford University) to discuss their work on library digital exhaustion and public service roles for digital libraries. They were joined by Lisa Radha Weaver, Director of Collections and Program Development at Hamilton Public Library, who discussed how library services have been transformed by digital delivery and innovation and Kyle Courtney of Library Futures/Harvard University, a lawyer/librarian who wrote the influential Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, signed by over 50 institutions. The panel was moderated by Lila Bailey of Internet Archive.
