The copyright and licencing minefield
Copyright? What copyright? from edans via flickr CC
I currently have a research project for work related to copyright and licencing for digital repositories. Essentially, what do we need to know at MPOW to make sure we keep up with industry best practice and best meet the needs of those depositing to our repositories?
I’ve been working on this on and off since mid November and all I can really tell you dear reader, is that I now know for sure that I don’t want to be a lawyer when I grow up.
I was at a UTS seminar a couple of years ago, not long into my career as a professional librarian, when I first heard Derek Whitehead from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne state that in his opinion, we need more lawyers working in libraries. At that point, I didn’t really understand what he meant, digital rights management was very new to me, but now! Particularly since I’ve started working in library repositories I’ve become very aware of the tricky-ness (a completely made up word meaning, more or less, complexity) of the issues of licencing in particular.
Creative Commons is the go-to answer, but part of my brief is to see what else is out there – are we just automatically using CC or is it in fact the best product for the wide and varied range of ‘stuff’ deposited to our repositories? It’s not helped by the fact that a lot of the literature on this comes out of the US – where the copyright laws are quite different to here. UK and European literature is also prolific and somewhat helpful, but it is the Australian and New Zealand stuff that is gold.
As always, my PLN has been invaluable in pointing me towards practitioners and I have a mountain of reading still to go. I’ll go get on with it shall I? Oh and if you have a useful resource for me, let me know?
Libraries as e-research partners
This post is a joint contribution from myself and my colleague Kate (@katecbyrne). We are presenting a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session at the E-Research Australasia Conference at the end of October where we hope to spark debate with our topic “E-Research and Libraries: A Perfect Partnership?”. We recognise this is at times a controversial space and the background to our approach is described in full in our abstract on the conference website & partially reproduced here:
Libraries have had long histories with many of the challenges facing e-research including interoperability, metadata creation, sustainability and ensuring that systems meet the needs of client communities. By earmarking academic and research libraries as potential collaborators for e-research projects, both researchers and libraries can maximise limited budgets and draw from the complementary expertise of both sectors. This includes capitalising on existing librarianship knowledge bases such as classification, metadata schemas, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri. Many of the demands of data management and respository services are similar to the demands of information management, the heartland of librarianship. However, potential benefits increase as other departments within an academic or research library are involved, allowing libraries to capitalise on existing relationships with researchers and exploit the library’s interdisciplinary focus and knowledge of projects, policies and networks across the university.
These partnerships are not without challenges. Libraries often have limited budgets which are allocated carefully to meet a broad range of needs across the university. They often cannot offer financial support or vast amounts of server space for data storage and as such independant project funding must often be secured. Not all libraries are comfortable in the e-research space and leaders in this field are still experimenting. There are parts of the e-research space such as respositories and bibliometrics in which libraries are more established; though fields such as research data management are undergoing rapid development.
A brief literature review reveals that for many academic or research libraries, e-research services have tended to cluster around repositories, either creating them as products or providing technical support. Several libraries also appear to be offering services exploring e-literacy for research. However, few have been identified as wholistically linking e-research services to the strategic aims of the library.
Now here’s where you come in. We recognise that there are many different arrangements in the e-research space and we would like to hear from librarians and researchers who have been working in the e-research space and are willing to share their perspective on library/e-research partnerships. We have three questions on which we are keen to crowd source opinions as conversation starters:
- What are the benefits of libraries or librarians getting involved in e-research projects?
- What are the challenges of libraries or librarians getting involved in e-research projects?
- Is the library involved in e-research initiatives at your university or research institution?
Please also let us know if you are willing to be identified with your quote. If you would prefer for yourself and/or your institution to remain anonymous please let us know if you are willing for us to describe your institution (eg. a mid-sized regional university) and how you would like us to do so. Leave your answers in the comments, or contact either one of us (@newgradlib or @katecbyrne) to get email details.
Thank you for your involvement and we hope to have you join in the conversation at our session if you are attending the conference.
Kate and Clare
Data management, open access and more
Drinks & Data by Andrew Turner via Flickr CC
I seem to remember promising some sort of #newjob update. As I’ve now been there nearly 2 months (time flies!) it’s a good time to stop and think about what I’ve learned and what I’m doing.
I’m reading and reading and reading about research data management, funding body requirements, data management planning and data citation at the moment. It’s more interesting than I’ve just made that sound – but it is a fairly dry subject to write about! My first uni assignment this semester is to write a press release for the general public on the importance of research data management. Really? I’ve had to have the jargon-buster out on that one trust me.
I ended up falling back on the good old narrative, story, analogy, what have you. How do you begin to describe the need for data management to people outside either the narrow data librarian world or the (some would say equally narrow) research world? By likening it to losing your mobile phone or laptop with all your photos, contacts and documents you were working on. A hook? Perhaps. Time (and whoever does my marking) will tell. If I get a good mark, I’ll share the press release here :-)
I do get to practice some of this in the real world soon. As part of my secondment to the library repository services team, I’m taking joint responsibility with a colleague for putting together some research data management information sessions for our academic services librarians (which is where I’m from). It’s an interesting juxtaposition – on the one hand I still feel like an academic services librarian, but I’m also starting to get my head around this data management stuff in a way that I hadn’t been able to before my secondment. The test will be if I can get a workshop written that convinces my former colleagues!
At the same time, I’m (slowly) getting a repository project underway. One of our faculties is about to acquire a collection of films and we are negotiating to store it in an open access repository. Enter a whole technical world full of phrases like harvesting, data streams, web-interface, deposit tool and wireframes. Yep.
Then there’s copyright. Particularly in relation to the upcoming film collection, I’ve spent weeks trying to get my head around copyright and licensing issues. Copyright in film is particularly complex – of course it is. I’m about to start adapting our legal-office-approved rights agreements that relate to theses and other written research outputs to suit film.
While most days I still feel like I’m going around in circles it is starting to make sense and writing it all down here has further crystallised some things for me. Proving that I need to blog more.
Data is the new black
Black-Eyed Susan 227 from cygnus921 via flickr CC
If you work in academic libraries sooner or later you are going to come across the issue of research data management. Increasingly, we are also working in an e-research space where everything from finding journal articles for a literature review through to making a copy of the finished work available in an institutional repository happens in an online space.
My previous posts on digital humanities send out a call for libraries to be more involved in this process and to come to the table as partners and collaborators with researchers. This is an area of librarianship I didn’t know existed before starting at MPOW 15 months ago and it has caught my interest in a big way.
I did say much of this #blogjune from me would be about data. Now I can reveal that I have a new job for the next 12 months and am going to be working in our library’s repository services team, talking about research data management all day long. It starts next week – stay tuned!
Libraries and the digital humanities
Inside the Shine Dome – Digital Humanities Australasia 2012
During the digital humanities conference I attended in Canberra in March, it struck me as odd that there wasn’t more library presence – both as presenters and delegates.
In casual conversation at morning tea on the final day, Professor John Unsworth of Brandeis University in the USA (one of the keynote speakers at the conference and vice provost for Library & Technology Services at Brandeis) said he thought there was a role for libraries to be represented at a much higher level. In his opinion, the participation rate of the LIS sector at the international Digital Humanities conferences is much higher.
The conference participants list outlined delegate’s institutions, not their affiliation within that institution so it is difficult to tell what representation there was from the LIS sector. My sense is that the audience was overwhelmingly academics – stumbling upon other LIS sector representatives was luck rather than management.
I turned to twitter (as I often do) and asked
Morning tea chat with Prof JohnUnsworth Brandeis University – he says international DH conference has up to 1/3 LIS delegates?
#dha2012Some GLAM representation here but overwhelmingly academic presence, lib tweeps, what barriers were there for you in coming?
#dha2012
I didn’t get a lot of response to this – but the responses I did get were around awareness. It’s an emerging field in librarianship, I get that. Although I had done some reading on digital humanities before heading to Canberra, it is the reading I’ve done in this area since that has crystalised some of the concepts for me.
Like any good LIS professional, I began with a google search and after reading many, many forum postings, blog posts, conference presentations and journal article abstracts I found this from the wikipedia entry:
The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from an earlier field called humanities computing, today digital humanities embrace a variety of topics ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital Humanities currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from the traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics,literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) with tools provided by computing (such as data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, computational analysis) and digital publishing.
Being a humanities librarian at the moment, I guess it’s natural that my specific interest is in this area, but through another project I am doing with a colleague I’m beginning to examine e-research and the role of libraries in a wider context.
I told you much of this month’s #blogjune will be about data.
The Digital Humanities continued…
The Shine Dome clock
Some time ago, I promised a series of posts following my attendance at the Digital Humanities Australasia 2012 conference. It has turned out to be an occasional series – with this being the the next occasion.
I was challenged to rethink my experience of the conference only last week, when I attended a presentation skills course conducted by NIDA. I’ve been preparing a presentation to give to staff at MPOW as part of the requirements of attending the conference, but the NIDA course challenged me to distill the message I wanted to give down to a 2-3 minute presentation – without powerpoint or other visual aids. Presenting without visual aids doesn’t frighten me per se, but the conference was very project-example heavy and I will be showing some of those projects during my longer presentation as a way of describing what I learned.
Taking the show-and-tell based presentation I had half prepared and turning it into 2 minutes of me talking about the concepts forced me to distil those concepts for myself – let alone my audience. I ended up dividing my talk into three sections. What are digital humanities? What were some of the key themes from the conference? What can/should libraries be doing to get involved?
What are digital humanities? Essentially anything humanities scholars do in a digital environment. This means that both the process of digitising a manuscript, artwork or other object AND/OR the subsequent use of that digitised product for research can come under under the umbrella of digital humanities scholarship. All clear? Further explanation from the research page of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London:
The digital humanities form a bridge between the traditional practices of research and the opportunities afforded by technology, providing scholars with new ways of looking at old problems, and the methods, tools and frameworks to support them in novel avenues of enquiry. … the digital humanities does not simply evangelise for the use of technology but provides a critical perspective on when it is appropriate (or not) to use a particular technology and how (King’s College London, 2012).
The more I read on the subject of digital humanities, the more this contextual definition makes sense. Four academics from King’s College presented a keynote panel at the conference on the challenges in collaborative research in the digital humanities and offered some sample projects from their current portfolio that can be viewed here.
What were the main themes from the conference? The overall conference theme was Building, Mapping, Connecting. From the sessions I attended and looking back over the twitter stream, blog posts that have been published subsequently and reflecting on lunchtime conversations I think the following emerged as recurrent, important themes:
- connection
- collaboration
- access
- metadata
- sharing
There were more of course, but as an LIS professional these resonated with me the most – and I am sure with most people reading this post. In most libraries, (in this context academic libraries), this is what we do, what we know how to do and this leads nicely to the third question which is….
How do/can/should academic libraries get involved? The answer to this is not straightforward and is going to vary from institution to institution, depending on the research focus of the library and the university. Some university libraries do not involve them in the research process very much, if at all, while others are focussing attention on research needs, including engagement with our role as digital libraries. Getting started may be as simple as starting to have conversations with the academics and researchers about what their needs are. Finding out how they see the library fitting into their research cycle is important, as is doing some brainstorming ourselves and coming up with some services to offer that they may not have considered as part of the library’s role. This from the blog Library Sphere:
In a world where the academic library’s value will increasingly be determined by the quality of its services rather than the number of physical objects it stores, we must have a deep understanding of how knowledge production is changing in the fields we serve and partner with scholars to build new services that they actually need.
At MPOW, the focus is on encouraging library staff to engage with the research communities in the university and there is already some collaboration going on between us. A recent job advertisement by Yale University Library has this to say about their library’s commitment to the field of digital humanities:
We are looking for a creative, technically-grounded, and visionary person who will serve as an advisor, advocate, and implementer for digital humanities at Yale University Library….This is an evolving specialization in librarianship, one that requires a combination of strong academic background in the humanities with technical knowledge, [and] curiosity about how technology is affecting research…We are seeking candidates with a keen interest in text mining and analysis, natural language processing, geospatial analysis, data visualization, and image analysis.
The job title is Librarian for Digital Humanities Research. Sounds pretty cool, yes?
Hierarchies of presence
Through the archway - the fabulous Shine Dome at ANU
Last week I attended the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association of the Digital Humanities, held at the Academy of Science’s Shine Dome at ANU in Canberra. I was there because of the interest at MPOW in our library supporting academic research and e-research in particular is becoming increasingly important to our role as Outreach librarians as we start to have conversations with academics about data management and access.
In an attempt to make some sense of the sometimes highly technical papers I went to over the three days, I will be blogging about a few recurring themes and also a number of individual papers, such as the one I’m talking about here.
On Day 3 I attended a paper by Dr Alice Gorman of Flinders University called ‘The personal is political: communicating archaeology and heritage through online platforms‘. Dr Gorman is also known as @DrSpaceJunk and blogs about space archaeology at Space Age Archaeology.
Now hearing from @drspacejunk about misperception of what archaeology and getting people interested in what it really is #DHA2012 (from @ellenforsyth)Space archeology – who knew?! #dha2012 (from @LizzieM79)@drspacejunk has divided audience – is space archeologist, crosses archaeology & space scientists, talking about bridging links #dha2012 (from @newgradlib)Really interesting discussion from @drspacejunk about the importance of identity to help explain her field of interest #dha2012 (from @newgradlib)
Hierarchies of presence: SM both passive & active backed up byacademia.edu & inst presence, supporting cred & authenticity #dha2012 (from @newgradlib)
I spoke with Alice after her presentation and a concrete example she gave me was an invitation she received (seemingly out of the blue) to speak to a group involved with something fairly obscure to do with plastic. It turned out, the event organisers found her because of a blog post she had written on cable ties. Because her various profiles and identities are linked back to her serious researcher profile, she was contacted as someone who had a valuable and serious contribution to make.
I have a strong personal interest in the area of social media and professional networks so this session was particularly appealing to me. I think it provided a useful take home message to start some discussions at MPOW about how we talk about some of this to our academics, particularly early career researchers (ECR’s) who do not have long and established publishing profiles and need to use a variety of ways to promote themselves and their work.
Journal or book – does it matter anymore?
Discarded Ideas 02.04.2008 by mskogly via flickr CC
Today I put out on twitter
Does it really matter if students know if their source is a journal or a book? Why/why not?
#infolit#crowdsourcing
as this is something that has increasingly had me wondering. This has been prompted in part by a discussion on twitter yesterday about whether as undergraduate students ourselves we ever used the library or contacted a librarian (most of us said no) and partly as a result of a discussion at MPOW about what the journal subscription model may look like in the future. I think both of these discussions are worthy of further investigation and thinking in their own right at another time.
So, back to the point of this post. As stated in the tweet, I was crowd sourcing, looking for some ideas, possible arguments for and against this position & trying to gauge the mood of my potential audience before putting this post out there.
I’m very grateful to my PLN for their responses, including:
still think it’s important because they will need to know for reference formatting. so boring but true
[important for] selecting sources, eg. book provides overview, journal more likely to be orig research…good scholarly practice
journals still regarded as “better” for some subjects
I don’t think it matters if the info is relevant to their topic eg history uses a lot more book references than info science
if trusted source (lecturer) is pushing papers to students distinctions b/w source types not key – all abt content
If students (& by this I am referring mostly to the average UG student, who make up the bulk of the student population at most universities) are given a list of readings or citations to look up, then yes, it’s helpful if they can tell the difference between a journal & a monograph. It certainly makes our job in reference much easier if they know that.
However, my point is slightly different – and here I run into the fact that at times it’s hard to express myself adequately in 140 characters. I think I am really asking “Once having arrived at the source, does it really matter what the source is?”
Let me explain further. At MPOW, we put a great deal of energy into helping academics generate stable links to our online resources. These links can placed into the Learning Management System (LMS) usually Blackboard or Moodle, and they route students via the library proxy server to land them at their article, e-book, digitized chapter or AV resource without the student having to navigate any of the path along the way – other than to authenticate themselves as our students at some point if they are off campus. So increasingly, students are not being given a list of readings or citations to look for and often their further reading from the subject can occur as a direct hyperlink provided in the document they were originally sent to read.
In my experience, the academics generally like these links and while it’s a slightly complex process to generate them it’s usually a one-off investment of their time. While some are concerned about what they see as the loss of student research skills, the feedback from most is that they want the students to read, absorb & synthesize the material. Many feel that unless it’s made easy for the students, they will just not bother reading it. I have also had academics tell me that the time spent generating these links pays off in terms of less time spent further down the semester track answering emails & phone calls from students who can’t find the citation from a list.
This situation of course causes an instant librarian dilemma! On the one hand, if the link is provided as a ‘click here’ service, without citation data being included then students arrive at the reading with no context whatsoever and this has the potential to bring an information professional out in spots. However, the point of this post is to stop and ask myself ‘why is this so?’
Even when academics attach the hyperlink to an actual citation, aren’t students still just going to click & not notice the context? Many e-records include a copy & paste ‘how to cite this’ – and while I understand that this may not meet the requirements of a particular referencing style, it still means students don’t really need to have context to create a citation for the information they have just used. It might look wrong and the student may lose a few marks for not following instructions, but let’s face it, an academic can still find & check the source document even if it’s formatted in Harvard when they really wanted Chicago or APA.
On the other side of this argument, supporting our academics is my role – and if this link generation makes their lives easier & enables them to help students focus on the skills of critically evaluating the content then isn’t that a good thing? Is this actually a similar argument to the print vs e? Is content king rather than the container?
Increasingly, the publishing gap between monographs & journals is closing. Traditionally journals are more agile, more reflective of current practice, published faster and peer reviewed journals are seen as more authoritative. The different publishing models, rise of open access publishing and the increase in academic blogging are all pushing the boundaries of the traditional model. I’m in no way suggesting we stop helping students understand how to evaluate their sources, I’m just wondering if the model for that is coming to its use-by date. Is the issue of format in publishing becoming irrelevant in that evaluation?
The obvious elephant in the room here is the serious researcher, whether post-grad or academic, as context is bound to be more appropriate or relevant to them, but they are not really who this is about. I think there’s a lot more to say on this topic and some others that float around it in a more or less connected way. Another time perhaps.
Thinking time
Unshelved 31 January 2012
I love this. I’m lucky enough to be ‘allowed’ to have thinking time at MPOW – it’s part of our job and often leads to new and interesting things. It’s not necessarily sitting-still-thinking, it might be an informal discussion over coffee with a colleague gathering ideas, or reading a blog post, or talking about twitter, or bouncing an idea for a research project.
All of this ‘thinking’ time means I am better prepared when I talk with academics, I know more about library services and options and I’m a more informed library professional. This is good.
