A Copyright Course for Librarians
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 03/30/2010
Copyright is a universal concern among librarians. But librarians in developing countries can have difficulty locating accurate information on how these laws affect them. Enter Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which recently launched an online curriculum called “Copyright for Librarians.”A Web site, distance-learning course, and wiki, the new resource is designed for all librarians—but with a special emphasis on those in developing and transition countries.
“Librarians and their professional organizations play key roles in shaping national and international copyright policy and protecting and promoting access to knowledge,” says William Fisher (pictured), faulty director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in a release. The Berkman Center would not make Fisher available for comment.
Two years in the making, the site is made up of nine modules dealing with topics from “Copyright and the Public Domain” to “Creative Approaches and Alternatives.” All materials are free, and can be self-taught or organized by an instructor for distance and classroom learning.
For those looking to teach the course online to students, the site supports a Rotisserie platform—which helps both instructors and students automate and organize homework assignments and discussions around each topic.
Copyright concerns have grown in the last decade as more creative work goes online, and along with it questions on how to use, disseminate, and share this content. For librarians who curate and catalog online media, understanding the law on how to protect the copyright of these materials as they use them is crucial.
The Berkman Center worked with the Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) in putting the site together, testing the modules on how well they worked—particularly with librarians in developing countries, according to a Berkman spokesperson.
“It is essential that the members of [elFL.net] have the fullest possible understanding, not just of the current copyright laws, but also of the ways in which those laws could and should be interpreted and modified in the future,” says Fisher. “We hope that this curriculum will help to advance that understanding.”
