Author Archives: Ryan Phillips

An interesting story related to copyright has been developing since last week. The story centers on photographs taken by a Macaque monkey in the company of nature photographer David Slater. During a photo expedition in Indonesia, Mr. Slater’s camera was briefly lifted by said monkey and while the camera was in her possession, she managed to snap a few spectacular photos of herself. Mr. Slater was able to retrieve his camera and the photographs were published in the Daily Mail earlier this month.

Techdirt posted the photos and wrote a short article that questioned who actually owns the copyright of the photos, if anyone. The Caters News Agency, representing David Slater, claims ownership but since the photographer, in this case the monkey, generally has the right to ownership, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick questioned the legitimacy of this claim. This article is linked below:

Masnick, Mike. “Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?” Techdirt. Web. 7 July 2011.

Then, last week, Techdirt posted another article detailing the correspondence between a representative at Caters News Agency and Mike Masnick where the former requests the latter remove the photos from the Techdirt website. This request came about despite the ambiguity of the copyright law with respect to photographs of such origin. Citation/link below:

Masnick, Mike. “Monkeys Don’t Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos.” Techdirt. Web. 12 July 2011.

This weekend, On the Media also covered this story cast in the broader context of the PROTECT IP Act, introduced to the Senate in May of this year.

On the Media. “Congress, copyrights and monkeys.” Web. 15 July 2011.

*I apologize for the simian pun.

This Fall Semester, Drexel University has assigned each of their 2,750 freshman a personal librarian. This “Personal Librarian Program” was drawn from similar programs at Yale and other institutions. The Drexel Library program has been been mentioned in articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Library Journal and other publications.

Dr. Danuta Nitecki, dean of libraries at Drexel, was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The program is a natural extension of what libraries have done for a long time, but now we are adding a more personal element.” The role of the personal librarian is designed to be introductory, where the student will use the librarian as a primary contact for using the library throughout the year. Twenty librarians support the Personal Librarian Program.

An article in Medical Reference Services Quarterly details the results from a librarian and student experience survey of the Personal Librarian program at Yale’s Cushing/Medical Library. This program was established in 1996. The mission here was to “encourage more personal contact with individual students.” The results of a student satisfaction survey shows 95% of survey respondents knew who there Personal Librarian was, and that 53% had taken initiative to contact them for guidance on library materials and other questions. The following is a link to Yale University Library’s guide to what a personal librarian does: http://www.library.yale.edu/pl/

Spak, Judy M., and Janis G. Glover. “The Personal Librarian Program: An Evaluation of a Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Outreach Initiative.” Medical Reference Services Quarterly 26.4 (2007): 15-25. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 29 Sept. 2010.

Attendees
Janey Chao, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Gerry Jiao, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Wilcina Longdon, Kannan Mohan, Ryan Phillips, Linda Rath, Chris Tuthill

Legal Information Industry 
The Tech Sharecase began with a discussion of the current state of the legal information industry. The conversation stemmed from a graphic done by Sarah Glassmeyer showing mergers of legal information providers. The graphic can be found here and posted on Sarah Glassmeyer’s blog.

We discussed how this has affected access. One results is costs have gone up. Westlaw Next will bill at $1,700 an hour if you don’t have a contract. The same problems are coming up in financial information industry too.

We recapped the situation surrounding the Firefox addon, RECAP, and the Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy’s efforts to build a free and open repository of public court records by providing access to PACER documents. We also touched upon Carl Malamud’s battle to make legal information available freely.

Louise mentioned the WorldBank is going to make all of its data, over 2,000 economic indicators,  freely available.  And we discussed some of the less-than-optimal methods information seekers go through in order to obtain information that is prohibitively expensive. The group noted instances where the situation has led information seekers to cross legal and ethical boundaries. Some scholars who have obtained data surreptitiously have been contacted by database vendors and been asked how they are able to source data to which those scholars’ libraries have no subscription.

Embedding Videos into LibGuides
Linda presented her centralized LibGuide which is a repository of video sites. It will be useful for others  creating LibGuides as they can copy boxes from Linda’s LibGuide. Linda explained how to solve the problem–windows overlap–by altering embed codes in edit mode. The solution is to add two lines of code to the embed script. Details are on Linda’s LibGuide entitled “Reusable Media.”

Last week I attended the William Badke presentation at La Guardia Community College entitled “From Broker to Strategist: Notes of a Traveler in the Strange Land of Information 2.0.” William Badke is an associate librarian at Trinity Western University and the author of “Research Strategies : Finding Your Way Through the Information Fog.” 

Mr. Badke’s began his presentation speaking about his own evolution as an educator and librarian and then presented ten informative and “sweeping but ultimately valid generalizations” about students ability to do research.  These generalizations and the full notes of the presentation have been posted on the blog of the the Library at La Guardia Community College.

• With the advent of the Internet, gate keeping of information is gone or has become ambiguous. This creates confusion for those looking for information.
• We fail to provide appropriate context for new sources, ways of searching and thus what is academically acceptable. For more information on this, see Badke’s article: “How We Failed the Net Generation.” Online 33, no. 4 (July-August 2009): 47-49
• Tools for acquisition are complex. This does not just refer to subscription-based tools found in the library, but Google products are also complex.
• Information is cheap and ubiquitous.

Badke pointed out that because information is cheap, ubiquitous, dissemination of information is not as valued as it once was. And, with regards to teaching, a passive intake of  freely available information is not as useful as engagement with the concepts or ideas. He says this is leading to a more engaged form of  learning–constructivism or active learning. Librarians, he continued, have a role in this new learning environment since information literacy is an integral component. Information professionals are valuable because of their knowledge of research methodology and as collaborators in the learning process.