Copyright Roundup: ACRL 2013 and in the Library Classroom

Recently I’ve been thinking about copyright and fair use, and specifically what we are telling students about these increasingly important matters. I think a lot of times we shy away from talking to students about copyright, because we are worried about giving them legal advice or because we assume that they don’t care and won’t listen. However, I think it is really important to talk to students about copyright, because we want them to be responsible users of copyrighted materials and responsible owners of copyrighted materials. If we don’t talk to them about the important social and economic issues around knowledge creation and production, where will they get their ideas about copyright from? The people who are talking the most vocally about it: big media conglomerates who have an interest in protecting their intellectual property at all costs. And if we don’t teach our students about fair use? Probably no one else will.

Flickr user: opensourceway

At ACRL 2013 this past month, I attended a session of three conference paper presentations that all had something to do with copyright. Jean Dryden discussed how online archives struggle with how to educate their users about copyright, and ultimately often fail to do so. I think we (librarians and other information professionals) should be taking every opportunity to talk to our users about these issues, especially in the case of archives, where we are the copyright holders or at least stewards of those copyrights. 

In the same session, James Neal, described the challenges and dangers we face on the intellectual property landscape. Corporate media interests and lobbyists are exerting pressure in Washington, D.C. for copyright reform in their favor, and the new director of the U.S. copyright office is indicating that she is looking for a new set of major copyright reforms. The Supreme Court and other courts have recently taken on a number of cases around copyright and intellectual property. Digital rights management is ever encroaching on our ability to own and use copyrighted materials. What have we been doing to be a part of or even a lead in these conversations? Neal pointed out that when professional bodies create ‘best practices’ they often undermine risk taking. In my favorite line of his talk, Neal reminded us, “Fair use is not civil disobedience; it is our most important tool and must be preserved.” 

Katie Fortney actually provided a great example of how we can use and protect fair use in her talk describing the creation of the Grateful Dead digital archive. She described how they triaged the items going into the collection, deciding if and how they would try to get permission from the copyright holders. For the 23,000 items that they posted under the presumption of fair use, they have received only 15 takedown notices and no claims of copyright infringement. Fortney said that it is misguided to allow fears about copyright guide our decisions about what to put into digital collections—we should be trying to make the best and most useful collections and we can use fair use to do so.

So what does this mean for reference and instruction librarians? I find that opportunities to talk about copyright and fair use come up all the time, and it is pretty easy to slip in some quick information about copyright. When students want to search for images, I send them to Flickr and show the advanced search options for Creative Commons licensed materials. When I cover citations in instruction sessions, I bring in the concept of fair use. (Kevin Smith this week laid out the three questions he tells students (and faculty) to ask themselves when considering fair use: “First, will the “quotation” of the original help me make my point?  Second, will it help my reader/viewer get the point?  Finally, did I use no more than necessary to make my point?”) In fact, I’ve had very engaged discussions with first year students on these topics, because these students have all run up against DRM when downloading or streaming music and videos online. This is a great way to talk about ownership and knowledge production, and to highlight the different norms in different communities. This is precisely the kind of information literacy I want my students to have because it so clearly translates from their academic selfs to their social and professional selfs. 

As I asked above, if we don’t talk to them about these things, who will?

Meaning Making in the Library: My Response to ACRL NW 2012

It didn’t take me long after beginning my work in libraries to realize that the “librarian as guardian of knowledge” idea had become totally outdated the moment our information formats stopped being physically scarce. And Barbara Fister’s critique of the “library as warehouse of information” metaphor at last week’s ACRL NW Conference pushed me to think harder about a couple of key questions: If it’s not a scarcity of resources that gets people into the library, then what is it? Why does the library still hold such a privileged place in our collective imagination, even as it's lost that place in our collective wallet? And, finally, why do I love my job so much, what brings me such intense joy on the reference desk and in the classroom?

I think that beyond information, beyond knowledge, beyond the technology that we provide access to, there is something that the library and librarians facilitate that is as valuable now as it has ever been, and depends on our communities as much as it does on our facilities, technologies, and commodities.  I’m not talking about the writing of papers, or the accessing of e-reserves, or the time in the study room, or the reading of a call number.  I’m talking about the ideal end of all of that work: the making of meaning.

Why do we ask our students to read, to write, to solve, to collaborate?  As educators, we hope that our students’ lives will be enriched by the connections that they make in the classroom.  I argue that that is precisely the beautiful, rich, hard work that I see happening around me, daily, in the library.  What is the library if not a rich site of contextualization?   To that end:

• We provide group study rooms so that students can build off of each other’s work to make something better than they could have made on their own.   
• We fill our shelves with the intellectual work of others so that our readers can discover that their experiences have been shared, or that others’ lives are profoundly different from their own.   
• We wait at the reference desk so that we can encourage the asking of deeper, more probing, more thoughtful questions.   

I feel most exhilarated at work not when I find exactly the fact that a student was looking for, but when I can see in a student’s face the dawning of a connection between their own experience/curiosity/question with another’s work/words/thoughts.

The UW Bothell, where I work, organizes a significant portion of its Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences curriculum around the “Banking Concept of Education” chapter of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It struck me that both Barbara Fister and Char Booth, in their keynote addresses at ACRL NW also used the “banking concept” as an important metaphor to work against.  In this chapter, Freire describes a prevailing attitude toward education that conceptualizes the transmission of information as being a uni-directional flow from the teacher to the student.  This disempowering process devalues the experiences, expertise, and contexts of the student and privileges the teacher as a single authority figure who embodies the “right” kind of knowledge (Freire 72).  Freire instead advocates for a decentralized power structure in the learning environment which recognizes what every member of the community brings to that new context and remakes every student as a teacher, and every teacher as a student.  In this model, the knowledge flow is multi-directional and meaning is made collaboratively in a process that he calls “mutual humanization” (75).

It is no surprise that Freire came up so frequently at this conference, because we are at a moment in our history as a profession when we are liberated from many of the old metaphors that have hemmed us in and occupied our time.  We all know, now, that information is easy to come by, but meaningful information is created, not stumbled upon.  We, as librarians, teachers, learners, and community members, have the license to communicate openly and lovingly with our intellectual communities.  We get to support and be supported by their ideas, energy, passions, questions, and labor.  And in that process, if we are open, passionate, and hardworking ourselves--if we maintain a position of radical curiosity toward our community members, library users, and environment--we can make beautiful meaning together.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30^th Anniversary Ed. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.

The Power of Narrative: ACRL NW 2012

This summer, Bookaneer Freeda Brook wrote an impassioned post about the specious stories of demise that are so popular in current discourse about libraries ("The Stories We Tell About Ourselves") after reading "The End of the Twighlight Doom" by Barbara Fister.  Brook ended her piece with a call for more of us to tell the stories of flourishing that constitute our daily experiences of the libraries in which we work, study, socialize, and grow.  It seems that ACRL NW heeded her call, and made the power of narrative the focus of this year's conference of Washington and Oregon librarians entitled: Libraries Out Loud: New Narratives of Enduring Value.  The conversations that followed both the opening and closing keynote addresses were exhilarating, as we all felt the power of our ability to collectively shape the conversation around libraries, learning and information.

We were lucky enough to have Barbara Fister herself as the opening keynote speaker (you can find the full text of her speech here, and I highly encourage you to read it).  Fister contextualized the current crisis narrative within a larger capitalism-flavored movement to monetize experience and fit research and learning into a purely  transactional model.  The overarching story under which we currently operate, goes a little something like this:

Information is something manufactured elsewhere and stored at the library.

For students, she said, that means that,

Authority exists outside of themselves and students come to the library to shop for nuggets of information.  Research is perceived as monetizeable and publications are tokens of productivity.

In this narrative, the library is the information wallet for the larger community of readers, researchers, and reluctant students on our campuses.  The bulk of our interactions with students and faculty revolve around buying resources, and then helping readers to access--through numerous convoluted pathways that have been predetermined by licensing agreements and copyright--what we’ve bought.  While we may bemoan the phenomenon of students who scan articles for useable quotes, we actively participate in this model by working within a market-oriented framework that emphasizes access and productivity over contemplation and creativity. 

But, Fister reminded us, markets, consumption, and monetizeation “are not always what people respond to.”  In fact, she estimates that it is the sense of the library as the intellectual commons of our institutions and communities that continues to bring folks to the library (be it virtual or physical).  In a sense, she suggested, it is our own inability, as librarians, to believe in the possibility of the commons—our buying into the narrative of the “tragedy of the commons”—that has allowed that commons to be enclosed around us in the form of skyrocketing prices, staff reductions, closures, and changes in our service orientation.

Fister called for a reinvigoration of the scholarship that we embody, support, collect, and make sense of by conceiving of it as a republic populated by peers.  Librarians, she said, are wonderfully positioned between professors and students.  We witness the research and discovery process on the part of students, we watch them work, and often, we are there to help them when they run into trouble.  At the same time, we attend department meetings, retreats, and trainings with faculty; we watch them develop reading lists and syllabi, and hear about the agony of the grading process.  We can act as well-informed translators between both kinds of work that we, too, wrestle with.  To that end, Fister called for a rejection of the crisis narrative of libraries, and called for, rather, a celebration of all the work that we excel at, a celebration of the collective, collaborative knowledge work that is done in and through the library.

Char Booth, in her closing keynote (slides here), responded beautifully to Fister’s themes by asking us to embrace the crisis narrative—not as something new and terrifying, but as an old story that signals the centrality of the library to major societal shifts in communication.  “Libraries” she said, have a very real history of decline, destruction, and displacement: they “have a history of being burned to the ground because it is a swift way to destroy a culture.”

Because libraries are, at their core, about the communication of knowledge, our seams will be strained every time there is a major shift in the modes of information distribution and communication.  “Libraries should not be an easy thing to advocate for,” according to Booth, because we have to respond, reshape, and revalue ourselves to stay useful to our communities with “every great format change” that the world undergoes.  This constant crisis state, she said, keeps us sharp.

Keeping that in mind, Booth urged us not to focus on the "container" and "content" metaphors that are so prevalent in narratives about the library as a place that holds books, because, when the boundaries of the physical library start to blur into virtual space, and the boundaries of books begin to dissolve into the ether of e-resources, we risk disappearing from the cultural narrative.  Rather, she suggests, we should focus on "concept" metaphors that speak to the lived experiences that most of us have about the library, or librarians--those positive, powerful, life-affirming narratives that communicate what we see people doing with and in the library: the sleeping, the growing, the making out, the writing, the sharing that has made the library a center of vibrant life on our campuses.

Though Fister and Booth fundamentally differed in their approach to the crisis narrative, each was saying essentially the same thing: we must put the emphasis back on our core values when we shape the narrative of the library in today's society, because those values speak to the role that we play in people's lives--not just the space we take up on our campuses.  The walls may tumble, and the books may crumble, but libraries are here to stay.