Public Domain Day 2012: Five Things We Can Do
There’s not so much excitement about Public Domain Day in the US, where no published works are scheduled to enter the public domain for another 7 years, due to a 20-year copyright extension enacted in 1998. But Americans don’t have to simply sigh and contemplate what might have been if our copyright terms hadn’t been extended. The new year still provides a number of important opportunities for Americans to improve access to the public domain.
Scholarly Communications @ Duke
Kevin J. Smith is Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer. His duty is to education faculty, administrators, and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing, and scholarly publishing. He holds an MLS as well as a JD, and has worked in academic libraries.
Seriously, this blog is a great read. If you ever find yourself confused by the ever sticky issues of copyright, I highly recommend this.
The sad fact is that The Lost Country has become a pretty obscure work. Amazon.com shows only two used copies available for sale. In the Duke Libraries, the last transaction record we have for your novel is in 2004, when our copy was sent to high-density storage. It has not left the facility once since then, and our system shows no circulations in the prior decade, either. One of the famous “laws” of librarianship is that every book should have its readers, and the current system, I am afraid, is failing to connect your book to new readers.
It has to be said that the Authors Guild is not going to help you in this regard. They are not going to publish a new edition of The Lost Country for you, nor will they pay you any royalties on the out-of-print edition. The Authors Guild simply does not have the ability to create a new market for your book. Even if they were to succeed in a grand strategy to impose a licensing scheme for orphan works in general, there is no reason to believe that you would profit from it. With such an obscure work, potential users who had to pay a fee would probably just skip the planned use.
” Kevin J. Smith, An Open Letter to J.R. SalamancaA Dirty Little Secret: Self-Censorship
Self-censorship. It’s a dirty secret that no one in the profession wants to talk about or admit practicing. Yet everyone knows some librarians bypass good books—those with literary merit or that fill a need in their collections. The reasons range from a book’s sexual content and gay themes to its language and violence—and it happens in more public and K–12 libraries than you think.
A Library's Approach to Books That Offend
In general, librarians are trained to tackle any complaints about books with a polite demeanor. But they are also instructed to stand firm in defending the book’s presence in the library.
On the rare occasions when a formal objection is upheld by library officials, a book may be removed or put in a less accessible area; that way, the challenged item remains in the library’s collection, although it is harder to find.
The Connecticut Four & The USA Patriot Act
Thought I’d dredge up this case in honor of Banned Books Week.
Four librarians were issued National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, and along with it, a gag order so they couldn’t even talk about it. This case went to trial, and when the librarians were outed by the Times, the government waited six weeks to drop the case until the Patriot Act was reauthorized so that the gag order could be continued.
It’s a good case to know about, and also to remember that librarians are constantly fighting for your right to privacy.
“As a librarian, I believe it is my duty and responsibility to speak out about any infringement to the intellectual freedom of library patrons,” said Peter Chase, Director of the Plainville Public Library and Vice-President of Library Connection in Connecticut. “But until today, my own government prevented me from fulfilling that duty.”
Oh yeah, also tomorrow? Banned Books Week.
Be ready for an onslaught. It’s going to be one crazy weekend.
Authors Sue To Remove Books From Digital Archive
Three major authors’ groups and eight individual authors filed suit against a partnership of research libraries and five universities on Monday, arguing that their initiative to digitize millions of books constituted copyright infringement.
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that “by digitizing, archiving, copying and now publishing the copyrighted works without the authorization of those works’ rights holders, the universities are engaging in one of the largest copyright infringements in history.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors and the Québec Union of Writers. Individual authors include Pat Cummings, Roxana Robinson and T. J. Stiles.
“We’ve been greatly concerned about the seven million copyright-protected books that HathiTrust has on its servers for a while,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of Authors Guild, an industry group that says it represents more than 8,500 authors. “Those scans are unauthorized by the authors.” HathiTrust is the name of the partnership of libraries.
HathiTrust argues that about 25% of their collection are orphan works, and these digitized books were provided by Google. Definitely an interesting article.
This year’s display! I’ve fallen in love with removable labels from DEMCO. The top is the adult display; each book has a label with a bright red slash/circle (what are those things called?) with some of the reasons the book was challenged or banned. This is the question we get asked the most—particularly when someone finds a classic or a beloved book. I got all of that information from the ALA website and the 2007 Banned Books Week Sourcebook. The close-up is LOTR which was burned with many other books for being “satanic”.
This year I kept the YA display separate, to encourage people to browse the books with the intent to check them out (which I think is easier when they’re browsing their reading level). For the teen books I went for a more provocative “Are you brave enough to read a banned book?” and a modification of the message from last year.
So, are you brave enough to read a banned book?
JSTOR makes early content free
“JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals, has announced it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States, and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR. Making this content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to independent scholars and others without access to an institutional subscription….” (JSTOR, Sept. 6 ) [text via American Libraries Direct]
Brilliant step, JSTOR. I knew you were one of my favorite databases for a reason.
