Week 4 - E-Reserves

First of all, I think I've figured out what the strange definition of subscription period we ran into on Friday means.  In order to get the exact wording, I found the same definition in the example Blackwell license from last week.  The definition is as follows: "that period nominally covered by the volumes and issues of the Licensed Material, regardless of the actual date of publication."  I think this refers to the fact that, for example, the October issue of a journal is often published and distributed in the middle of September.  If a library's license ended on September 30th, it would not have access to the October issue, according to this definition, even though the issue was published during the time of its license.

Moving on to this week's reading, I noticed that Learn@UW does not comply with one of the CONFU Guidelines for E-Reserves.  Specifically, these guidelines recommend "on a preliminary or introductory screen, electronic reserve systems should display a notice, consistent with the notice described in Section 108(f)(1) of the Copyright Act."  That particular section states that a notice should be posted informing patrons that making a copy may be subject to copyright law.  After carefully looking through Learn@UW, I have not found this notice on any of the pages from login to actually viewing course reserves.  The fact that I can't find this notice is especially interesting because according to the expert report by Kenneth D. Crews, UW-Madison states in its E-Reserves policy that there will be a "copyright notice on screen" as well as on the material itself.  However, I did find something interesting in reading all the fine print on Learn@UW.  There is an interesting sentence in the privacy notice on the main page stating "federal law and UW-Madison policy require that you must not reveal any information about classmates, course work content, or its authors to anyone outside the course."  This passage intrigues me because I am curious about its purpose.  Perhaps it is meant to protect the privacy of students' comments in discussion, content a professor might post and may want to publish in a journal later, or even the fact that a particular student is taking the course.

Reading about policies on E-Reserves this week is especially timely because I have an entire one hundred page book to read for another class this week that is posted on E-Reserves.  Neyer recommends that if professors are handling their own E-Reserves, policies should be distributed to them stating restrictions such as "items that cannot be digitized and placed on electronic reserves would include an entire book."  Perhaps my professor avoided this restriction by obtaining permission from the author or publisher to distribute the entire work.  One aspect of this book that complicates its distribution is that it is by a local author and out of print.  A quick internet search reveals that it is not easily obtained from any online vendors besides Ebay.  Ebay clearly cannot be relied upon to provide approximately forty copies to the students in my class and I feel that lack of availability should be included as a factor to consider in an E-Reserves policy.

Something I found interesting in both Russell and Neyer is the fact that both include quotes encouraging fair use so that, in the future, standard practice doesn't limit fair use.  For example, if all libraries developed a policy of limiting photocopying to one page of a work, eventually most patrons and librarians would assume it was against the law to copy even two pages.  I especially like the quote in Russell from "a former U.S. Register of Copyrights" which states "'If you don't use fair use, you will lose it!"'  I found this advocacy for using fair use interesting because it appears that Georgia State University did just that and ended up in a lawsuit.  Granted, the lawsuit only started on April 15th, 2008 and the quotes in both Russell and Neyer are from years before the lawsuit occurred.  I wonder if those quoted would express the same sentiment now.