Monthly Archives: March 2015

International ILLiad Conference 2015

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Each year Atlas Systems sponsors the International ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach. This year there were close to 400 attendees from six countries, including Egypt, Japan, the UK, Canada, and Singapore.  Representatives from Atlas, OCLC, Reprints, and the Copyright Clearance Center were on hand to meet, present, and converse.  In terms of the work of our unit, there is no better conference to attend; it’s a total immersion into the world of resource sharing and the product that runs it.  Sessions are focused on how to use the system more efficiently, how to deliver better service, and how to better manage to create time and cost savings.  The setting is dynamic and includes conversation both ways.  There is no better venue to raise issues to a larger scale and create change.

Three DD-ILL staff presented posters: Terry Palacios-Baughman presented on how she has transformed her student operation to be much more efficient and self-managing, and Erika McNeil and Stan Huzarewicz presented on serving students with disabilities using ILLiad.  The poster session was over two hours long and we literally had lines of people who wanted to talk with us about what we’re doing.  One comment from someone who talked with Terry: “If there was one thing that made this conference worth going to, it was this.”

The keynote, “Is Your Library Visible?,” was given by Eric Miller, from Zepheira, who is leading efforts to apply advanced Web architecture and linked data principles to help libraries organize disparate materials in order to solve real-world problems.  He recently founded Libhub, an initiative that focuses on raising the visibility of libraries on the Web.

There were many conference sessions to choose from.  Leadership in Resource Sharing focused on using data to demonstrate our impact, exposing gaps, and expanding the kind of information we offer that can be useful to others in an organization.  Attendees of this presentation were interested to learn of our recent experience with Tableau.

Textbooks and ILL related one institution’s experience with moving from “no textbooks” to “any textbook.”  This new service philosophy significantly impacted the way patrons viewed the library, and their process became much less mediated.

There was an update meeting led by OCLC and Atlas Systems that related what’s new in this summer’s ILLiad update.  Exciting to those in resource sharing: an Addon to place British Library requests that includes real time availability, new options in “days to respond,” improvement in the IFM process, and more.  This was followed by an open floor discussion of the upcoming changes and attendees were offered an invaluable opportunity to ask questions and provide comments and feedback before official implementation.

There was a lot of fun to be had in What Would *You* Do?  ILL Best Practices for Worst-Case Scenarios.  From the traditional “my cat ate it,” and “we have bedbugs” to “I left my book on a mountain in Tibet, can I have another copy?” and “they burned the book we mailed back to your country at the border,” everyone had a story.

One session previewed a new ILL cost calculator that is coming soon, building upon a cost study that we participated in several years ago with folks from Kansas and Las Vegas.  We will be an early adopter of the study which will allow us to enter and compare costs in real time.  This project is being led by OCLC Research in collaboration with SHARES partner institutions.  We will be able to enter data yearly, compare our costs with other institutions, track changes, simulate changes we might make in joining a consortium or acquiring a piece of equipment, run reports, and so on.

Bucknell gave a talk ILLiad, GIST, and EBL: How Bucknell University’s PDA + DDA Collection Development Model Gives Patrons What They Want, While Saving the Library Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars a Year.  They cancelled their print approval plan and automatic shipments and moved to a completely patron-driven acquisitions monograph collection development policy.  GIST is free and open source, and merges and streamlines Acquisitions and ILL request workflows using ILLiad, leveraging systems to do more work while reducing the staff time necessary to make informed decisions and process materials.  Originally part of New York’s IDS project, the toolkit is now in use at institutions all over the country, such as Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Missouri, Texas, Virginia, etc.  Here’s a link to their paper.  More information on GIST can be found here: http://www.gistlibrary.org/illiad/#.VRBYrvnF98E.

GIST Workflow

Let’s Play Nice: Shared Server 101 offered detailed information about the ILLiad Customization Manager settings and provided caution regarding partner site settings in a shared ILLiad environment. The information will be very pertinent in regard to potential changes to UConn Health’s adoption of ILLiad as a satellite to Storrs.

We took advantage of having representatives from Atlas and OCLC to discuss various transitions we’re going through right now, as well as to talk about potential enhancement requests with ILLiad WebCirc.  Also significant to our unit, I met with Yale’s Associate Director for Resource Sharing and Reserves and we came to an agreement of reciprocity.

It was all this and more.  This was my first time to this particular conference, and I’m still having conversations that were begun there.  There’s a world of information and possibility in this gem of a conference.

Copyright for Educators and Librarians

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Did you know that you may be a copyright owner and not realize it even if you haven’t published a paper? That a library included text from books in its floor with impunity?
I took the advice of my colleagues and registered with Coursera for my first MOOC, a four week professional development course on Copyright for Educators and Librarians that focused primarily on U.S. copyright. The course ran for four weeks from July 21st to August 18th.There were three instructors who all had library degrees, then went on to obtain JDs and work in the Scholarly Communication Offices at their respective universities – Kevin Smith, Duke University; Anne Gilliland, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Lisa Macklin from Emory University. They were passionate about what could have been a very dry subject.

The course was divided into four units. The first three weeks had video lectures by one or more of the instructors. There were readings including selections from books by Kenneth Crews and Peter Hirtle, which served as our main textbooks. You may have heard Hirtle speak when he gave a lecture at Homer Babbidge Library last April entitled, “Living with Risk. Managing the Risk of Copyright.” We also studied the U.S. Copyright Act, sections of Title 17 of the U.S. Code, which required careful scrutiny. All readings were provided online. Students were expected to participate in the weekly forum and acquired points for posts. Then there was a quiz at the end of each week. Week 4 required a written Framework Analysis applied to a very complicated copyright situation. When the course started it wasn’t required for successful completion of the free version but during the second week the rules were changed, which did surprise me. I didn’t pay in order to use the Coursera symbol but did all the work and received a “Certificate of Accomplishment with Distinction” for achieving a high grade.

Unit 1 “A framework for thinking about copyright” covered the history of copyright going back to the king and queens of England. Queen Mary chartered the Royal Company of Stationers in 1557 and it had begun before her with the “Letters Patents”. In this unit we also learned that copyright happens as soon as the original work of authorship is fixed in a medium perceptible to the human senses. Registration is a different matter and is needed if you wish to sue in federal court.

Unit 2 “Authorship and rights” This is the unit that says you own copyright too. Students own copyright as well. Teachers should ask students permission to use their work. Some may want it kept private. Many institutions have a policy about using student work. Authorship of works for hire is a complex subject that was covered. The employer owns the rights unless it is an independent contractor in which case it should be spelled out in a signed contract. I was wondering who owns the rights to the beautiful fountain in the UConn Waterbury courtyard.

Unit 3 “Specific exceptions for teachers and librarians” I learned that the TEACH Act provides exceptions for teachers in the classroom but it does not apply to online resources, such as reserves, because reserve readings are not face to face use. Something I have become very familiar with lately due to obsolete VHS tapes that faculty still want is the Copyright Law Section 108 provision for making a copy with the notice if a reasonable effort has been made to find a replacement.

Unit 4 “Fair use” This is the part I was most familiar with but was interested in learning more as I sometimes need to evaluate the four fair use factors when posting reserve materials to HuskyCT:
1. The purpose and character of the use
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount of the portion used in relation to the whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market

If you are interested in music or photography, this class covered those subjects as well. Copyright infringement of songs has been in the news lately. A song may have different copyright owners for the music and the lyrics. When you use a photo, you may need copyright permission for the building in your picture. If this course is offered again, I highly recommend it.

Works Cited

Crews, Kenneth. Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2012. Print.

Hirtle, Peter, Emily Hudson and Andrew Kenyon. Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives and Museums. Cornell University Library, 2009. Print.