What this tool can do for you:

• Help you better understand how to determine the “fairness” of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code.
• Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation.
• Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?]
• Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels.

Looks nifty! I don’t have a reason to use it now, but it’s a great tool to remember.

The host site, Copyright Advisory Network from the ALA Office of Information Technology Policy has more great tools and information about copyright and the use of copyrighted material.

(Source: twitter.com)

If they’d been asked to find something written or painted or built during the middle ages, then find out whatever they needed in order to understand the thing they were examining and its context, and then to explain their observations in writing, I suspect they wouldn’t have been so spooked. It would still have a challenging writing assignment for new college students who don’t know much about the medieval world, but they would have gamely done their best, and they probably would have even enjoyed themselves. What surprised me was the deer-in-the-headlights stare, their anxious uncertainty about what, exactly, counted as a primary source, their inability to leaf through the anthologies of primary sources they had available to them and pick one to play with, the agonizing problem of committing to a particular direction for their paper.

A liberal arts degree might prepare graduates for life, but there is too little focus on the first job out of college.  A professional education may do a good job preparing graduates for their first job, but that training is not likely to give the flexibility to prepare them for their second and third jobs.  A program that combines these two approaches prepares graduates for the first job, their second job, and beyond.  Students (and the parents of traditional age students) who are concerned about beginning their careers (and paying off their loans) should find this combination to be an attractive option.  Employers should also prefer students who arrive as career-ready and prepared for life, in other words, with important professional skills but who are also prepared to advance in and contribute more to their businesses, institutions and communities.

Either way, I should think libraries are heavily involved in making this happen both from the perspective of providing access to resources as well as from the perspective of helping with the instruction necessary for students to be prepared to make a contribution in life (e.g. information literacy is important for voters to be well-informed).

Professionally? I’m a librarian, not a curator of a collection of books. Books are just one (sometimes small) part of what I do for a living. Further, being a librarian means I get rid of books sometimes. I get rid of books that are duplicates or inaccurate or damaged or smelly. I get rid of books to make space, to improve the look of the collection, and to make sure I have up-to-date information. I get rid of books that were donated to the library but for which the library has no use.

ebookporn:

In this excellent article Peter Meyers Rethinks how to pick ebook enhancements and breaks it down to five areas of opportunity: Comprehension, Memory, Interpretation, Relevance, and Extraction & Action. ~ eP

Most ebook experiments do a better job of showing off our devices rather than solving specific reader problems. We get video extras, web links, piped in Twitter feeds. Problem is, these “enhancements” often answer the wrong question: what can we add? In an age of Information Overload, readers don’t need more; they need help. A video of battle footage may be fun to watch, and a simple way to add what’s not possible in print. But what students of World War Two often struggle with is much more mundane: remembering key events for that upcoming test or prepping for an essay they’re writing.

Rather than starting from what the iPad or EPUB 3 makes possible, we should instead think about where print fails to solve readers’ needs…

There’s a choice academic and public libraries face. One  is to focus entirely on providing access to the published information that our community members want. The other is to make libraries a platform for creating and sharing culture.

…

But we too have choices to make, both libraries and scholars. The next time your library spends $40 to get you an article you want to read, think about the implications. Is this really how we want to do it? Do we conduct research and write it up so that those who are affiliated with institutions that can afford to subscribe to lots of journals or can pay $40 for the temporary personal use of an article can have that knowledge, but nobody else can? Really?

libraryadvocates:

Today America’s library system sits at a critical juncture. The Library of Congress alone has lost some 1300 staff since the onset of the digital media age two decades ago. Until last week, four of the six largest American publishing houses did not lend digital books to libraries, president of the New York Public Library Anthony Marx noted. And last month, the NYPL’s move to renovate its landmark headquarters to include more computers and resources for the general public prompted protests from scholars and writers who wanted to preserve the space for research.

Despite these challenges, the transition to digital media continues to open doors for innovative public service. The Library of Congress is spearheading the creation of a new World Digital Library with 145 institutions worldwide. The project allows the United States, often criticized for supplanting other cultures identities, to help with the repatriation of other countries’ unique cultural memories, said the Librarian of Congress James Billington. The Digital Public Library of America, an online project shepherded by Harvard University to spread knowledge beyond traditional library shelves, aims to launch in April of next year.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2118141,00.html#ixzz1z1K5J6m6

Add to the list of talking points for the next time you petition your popularly-elected representatives.

(Source: thelifeguardlibrarian)

(Source: twitter.com)

If you want a depressing exposition of what you can and can’t do as a college student armed only with a mobile phone, read this article: Smartphones Bring Hope, Frustration as Substitute for Computers. It details all the limitations with smartphones as computers, a situation many poorer students with either no computer or no Internet access face. And let’s face it, without Internet access, a laptop might as well be a brick when it comes to research. Sure, many of us wrote numerous college essays on computers with no Internet access (and probably even some typewriters), but that was before most of the research material was online, back with journals and indexes were in print. With a wifi-less laptop, you could still do a lot of reading and writing, but finding and getting to that reading would be a lot more difficult. Imagine trying to all your college research and writing on a smartphone.

(Source: twitter.com)

If you don’t have time to read this entire blog post, here’s the tl;dr version: if you think, as I do, that the investment we make in basic research should be maximized through making that research accessible to all, sign the petition.

If you’d like to know more, here’s why I think this petition is worth signing.

I’m a huge fan of PubMed Central. Just the other day, a student was desperate to find an article quickly – any article, so long as it presented original scientific research on a particular species of tree. Normally, I would have pointed her to a biology database, but our library is small and that database’s coverage is deep, so she would have had to click through lots and lots of articles before finding any in full text or print in our library. I showed her PubMed Central and she had several articles to choose from, all full text, within seconds.

Even better, when she graduates, she can still search PubMed Central and read those articles. We are required by almost all of our licenses to cut students off the minute they graduate. What a great way to prepare students for lifelong learning: get them hooked on scholarly research, then show them the door.

The NIH Public Access policy began twelve years ago. A decade of medical information online, usually after a year embargo, freely available if you received NIH funding. This is a huge resource to graduating students, unaffiliated researchers, and people of all persuasions trying to find a study about a drug for themselves or a loved one.  Certainly there is a lot more than just a decade of information in PubMed Central, which is where those articles must  be deposited, but it’s certainly helping those numbers tick up regularly.

Earlier this year we had RWA, the Cost of Knowledge (which you can still sign, btw), and FRPAA making major headlines. Now here’s another opportunity.  We’re petitioning the White House to speak out on making tax payer funded research freely available via the internet to tax payers.

By all means, sign the petition! I signed on Monday (#2,270). :)