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8 May 2007
Do we know enough about licensing
Posted by Richard Wallis at May 8, 2007 12:20 PM
OCLS's Eric muses, over on It's all good, about the lack of librarian education in the areas of content licensing and copyright.
Eric quotes an article in the March issue of InfoToday by K. Matthew Dames (of CopyCense):
“Assuming that the procurement mechanism for electronic content is a license, how can librarians fulfill the fundamental role of collection development in the 21st century if they can’t read, understand, and negotiate those contracts?”
Which then leads Eric to say:
I think one might reasonably argue that librarians have long been “technicians of the intersections” – perhaps what distinguishes Librarian 2.0 from Librarian 1.0 is less the new tools applied and more the mix of new stuff. Econtent licensing expertise is surely one of the more richly textured intersections librarians must master. Are we giving the econtent procurement competency its due with respect to preparing professionals, or – as Dames asserts – is it something library science and information studies programs are failing to give the emphasis such deserves in a Web 2.0 world?
I agree, as more and more new stuff is being delivered as econtent, being on top of the licensing an copyright issues is becoming more important. By 'on top of ' I don't mean just understanding and accepting the terms offered by the providers.
Librarians with skills and experience in copyright and licensing should be negotiating terms that open up and simplify access to content and data for the benefit of the library users, removing some of the restrictions and hurdles between the content and the people that can benefit from it.
Of course this is not a new problem. If this sort of knowledge and understanding had been part of a librarians experience in the past, maybe we wouldn't be paralyzed with indecision about the use and opening up of OCLC/catalogue data, in the way we seem to be at the moment.
(Photo taken by ~Firyx displayed in Flickr) .
Technorati Tags: Talis, Library, Open Data, Licensing, Catalog, NGC4LIB, OCLC, Copyright
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Comments
There is so so much that is not included in library education that really ought to be, these days.
For instance, my recent education at a highly regarded library school did not mention once the existence of something called a 'link resolver'.
I did have a class in intellectual property law and copyright, which provided a better than nothing grounding for approaching licensing, but didn't really specifically talk about licensing much--even from a theoretical legal perspective, let alone from a practical business perspective.
Posted by: Jonathan Rochkind at May 8, 2007 09:42 PM
