Librarians Teaching Faculty and Students: Copyright Literacy in Higher Education #wlic2017

My second post on the mini-conference on Models for Copyright Education in Information Literacy Programs at the 2017 World Library and Information Conference held in the Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa (University of Lower Silesia), Wroclaw. The post-lunch session was on Librarians Teaching Faculty and Students: Copyright Literacy in Higher Education (Part 1). It was moderated by Lisa Hinchliffe, the new chair of the IFLA Information Literacy Section (who is shown standing to chair the first panel of the day: photo Mirek Antoniewicz).
Firstly Min Chou, New Jersey City University Library (US) talked about Academic Libraries’ Role in Teaching about Copyright and Fair Use. This was based on her doctoral research. In the US digital copyright laws (DMCA and TEACH) require insitutions to have copyright policies. Her research was explore the state of copyright policies, and the extent to which fair use was covered. She undertook a qualitative study used Lessig's model of the modalities of regulation (identifying norms, architecture [technical], law, the market as four forces). She examined material from 115 universities, looking at policies and guidelines, endorsed at the university level, published on university websites. 50 institutions had official policies on fair use, 33 more had advisories on fair use. Few covered case law on fair use, and some policies were out of date. Longer did not necessarily mean better. Some were shorter but comprehensible and referred to fuller documents. The speaker identified that policies had to be proactive to incorporate change, and also making policies should involve stakeholders in dicussion.

Rodney Malesi, United States International University-Africa (Kenya) talked on Building Information Literacy in Copyright, Licensing, and Related Legal Matters: A USIU-Africa Library Experience. He started by explaining something about his university. The learning outcomes for the university included "Integrity": complying with copyright falls under that (other outcomes included lifelong learning and academic freedom). Kenya is a signatory to the TRIPS and WIPO copyright treaties. INASP has been key in copyright education for librarians. The speaker identified that copyright was part of information literacy education: ideally this involved collaboration with faculty, but as in other countries this could be a challenge. Sustaining student interest was also challenging! Copyright training included definition of terms, plagiarism, fair use, copyright, public domain and creative commons. Ways for the future include incorporating the General Assessment Committee's recommendations on information literacy, examining IFLA's guidelines on copyright literacy, and exploring gaming (e.g. Secker and Morrison's card game).

Finally Kathy Kristie Anders and Emilie Algenio, Texas A and M University (US) talked on Copyright Education for Graduate Students: A Scalable Model. They identified the ACRL IL frames "Information has value" and "Scholarship as conversation" as relevant for copyright. The context for the copyright education was an information literacy programme for graduate students (a non-homogenous group). Copyright was relevant in terms of ownership, reuse and distribution. They have 14,000 graduate and professional students, so the baseline is an online copyright tutorial that students have to pass, covering copyright basics. The second tier consists of face to face and online workshops (some of which are embedded into other programmes; they also work with the Writing Centre), and the third tier consists of one-on-one consultations (which can be idenitfied through interactions at the second tier, or there may be referrals). What it means to be a responsible copyright owner is one of the common messages. Challenges include scaling up deep learning, and getting contact before the need gets urgent. Success strategies include collaboration, advertising, hooking into university inititaives and institutional goals.