About Molly

Librarian. Copyright specialist. Serial snacker. Unofficial Creative Commons evangelist.

When librarians are obstacles

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Molly

Heading into the Open Ed Conference and especially the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, I expected to be one of only a handful of librarians participating. Librarians haven’t been terribly involved or engaged with the open education movement, but our values and missions align so well that I expected to be welcomed by the professors and the edupunks as a peer and fellow traveller. Well, I got the first part right – I met only a couple of librarians all week – but the second, not so much. Imagine my surprise when the other two speakers in the session on libraries and the future of OER spent much of their time criticizing the ways in which librarians have engaged with open education, and lamenting the possibility of librarians being anything other than a liability.

Julià Minguillón, a computer science professor who spoke about digital preservation issues, described attempting to deposit an equation into his university library’s OER repository, only to be told that because his equation did not have a title, it could not be included in the collection. He then went on to criticize librarians’ obsession with the “useless” metadata of “author, title, date.” He argued that if we put librarians in charge of OER repositories (exactly the thing I argued for in my paper), we will sacrifice broad, immediate access in favor long-term preservation and proper metadata schemas.

R. John Robertson gave a paper about the role libraries can play in supporting OER initiatives but a significant portion of his presentation was given over to his concerns about librarian participation in this work. His experience with librarians is that they are so risk averse that the merest hint of a copyright issue is likely to send them running for the hills. Like Minguillón, he had anecdotes to back up his worries about librarians as obstacles in the field of open education.

In a word: Blergh! How did this happen? Why, despite biannual New York Times articles about how modern and hip librarians have become, are we still perceived on our own campuses as fearful impediments to progress?

Okay, I know why. Some librarians are fearful impediments to progress. Some librarians allow perfect metadata to be the enemy of good access. Some libraries, as institutions, do not foster innovation and experimentation, and are deeply resistant to change. It’s so disappointing.

It probably says something about the job I’ve had for the last year and a half that I see this primarily as a failure of management. On the plane to Barcelona I read a column by Meredith Farkas in American Libraries called “Nurturing Innovation: Tips for Managers and Administrators.” She offers a number of excellent suggestions for ways to adjust the institutional culture at libraries to support and embrace innovation: Encourage staff to learn and play, give staff time to experiment with potential new initiatives, keep an open mind, develop a risk tolerant culture. These suggestions kept coming back to me at Open Ed as I struggled to defend librarians and libraries against accusations of stodginess. I wanted to hand the article over to the people who complained about their uptight, change resistant libraries and say, “It doesn’t have to be this way. Go talk to your Dean. Make it better.” I also, in that way that sometimes happens, added one more suggestion to the list, thinking it was from Farkas but it’s from somewhere else, part of a theme that developed at Open Ed: Library administrators must make some room in their budgets for failure.

Innovation and progress can’t happen without failure. It’s how we learn, as individuals and as institutions and as species. Yes, library budgets are tight these days. Tighter than we ever thought they could get. With money so tight, and cuts so deep, it’s easy to think that now is not the time to take risks, but of course, now is exactly the time to take risks. How else will we prepared to address the challenges that await us in next year’s budget cycle, and the one after that, and the one 15 years from now?

To use one relevant example: The current commercial scholarly publishing apparatus is choking us. We know this. Knowing this, we have two choices: We can invest in activities that could ease the financial pressure – open repositories, deposit mandates, awareness campaigns – or we can choke. In this case, many libraries are experimenting, and sometimes those experiments even fail. As Farkas points out, when our experiments fail we still learn something valuable from them, something that can set us on a path to succeed the next time.

It’s not enough simply to encourage our staff to experiment. We need to give them money to play with, to set up a repository or buy a license to a promising tool or hire an expert to train staff in something new. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money, but it does have to be relatively free from strings. And then, we need to make sure our experimenting staff share what they’ve learned with colleagues in other libraries, the successes and the failures. It’s how we will all evolve.

So to wrap up this meandering post with a tidy bow: Higher education is changing, and our campuses are full of people (many of whom were at Open Ed and Drumbeat) experimenting with new models, tools, and philosophies related to teaching, learning, and research. The primary responsibility of academic libraries is to support teaching, learning, and research, and so those experiments and the people conducting them are highly relevant to us. We must make sure that we remain relevant to them. If they see us as an obstacle it is only a matter of time before we become obsolete. We want those experimenters and innovators to view the library as both a resource for and a partner in their work, and we can do that by funding innovation among our own staff, expanding our definition of the library’s role on campus, and embracing the possibility of failure. If we neglect to do these things, we don’t just risk becoming obsolete, we guarantee it.

The ecosystem of educational resources

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Molly

This week I am in Barcelona for the Open Education Conference and the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. It’s been a very inspiring few days, and most inspiring so far was a talk by Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education in the United States Department of Education. The title of his talk was “Meeting President Obama’s 2020 College Graduation Goal – The Role of Open Educational Resources,” but his focus was actually on how to foster a culture of sharing among academics, including the very important role that government policymaking has to play. I think it’s exciting to know that there is someone helping to make educational policy who thinks the way Hal Plotkin does.

The most compelling element of this talk for me was Plotkin’s framing of the market for educational resources as an ecosystem. It began with an anecdote: At Foothills De Anza Community College, where Plotkin worked for many years, he saw at the start of each term students roaming the college bookstore, course catalogs in hand, trying to figure out which courses they could afford to take based on how expensive the textbooks were. Economic considerations were often the most important factor that students used to decide what course they could take.

There was a statistics professor at Foothills De Anza who had created his own textbook, and sold it through the college bookstore. Another statistics professor came to campus, and she wanted to create an open stats textbook, one that would be available to students for free online. The college helped her do this, and then there were two statistics classes available to students, one with a free textbook and one with a textbook they had to buy. Students voted with their feet, and enrollment in the class with the proprietary textbook dropped so low that the college nearly cancelled it. It also turned out that students in the OER class did better in subsequent stats classes, probably because they could keep their textbooks instead of selling them back to the bookstore so they could afford books for the new term. Over time the faculty member with the proprietary textbook finally understood what was happening, made his book open, now there are choices between two different open textbooks and sections on campus.

This shift from closed to open happened at Foothills De Anza Community College, not by mandate or new requirements, but by the creation of an alternate OER universe, one that is so advantageous to the community that, and I’m quoting Plotkin here, “in the natural biology of things it overtakes the less useful organism that’s part of our enterprise.”

Expanding on this story, Plotkin argued that what’s most effective in changing the culture is to look for the adopters of OER and to impel or encourage our governmental entities and governance structure in higher education to support the faculty members who want to engage in OER scholarship and the OER community. We can do this without wasting any energy in trying to convince those who are not convinced. We have enough opportunity on our hands, enough interested scholars and faculty members around the world who want to participate in this alternate academic universe that we can spend all our time fruitfully engaging them and working with them without ever wasting our time on the opposition. Over time, if we continue to nurture and support the faculty who want to be a part of a different structure, an open structure, a sharing structure, these stronger, healthier practices will overtake the old, closed practices, and push them towards extinction.

This is not a new argument. Here’s the part that was new to me: We don’t need to do this by changing the copyright law. We don’t need to attack the existing structures head on. We don’t need to fight against anything. We can let the Elseviers and Cengages keep their life plus 70 copyright terms and their draconian licensing practices. All we need to do is help open educational resources flourish – on a giant scale, a federally funded scale – and soon enough, the tough old dinosaurs of commercial publishing will evolve or die out.

Plotkin’s talk focused on the role of government and higher education administrators to support open models of educational publishing, but I think it applies just as well on a micro level. Rather than trying to convert the masses of faculty who have never heard of OER, or who actively oppose it, librarians and other proponents of sharing on campus should focus all of our time finding, reaching out to, and supporting the faculty and students on our campuses who already get it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how exactly we can do those things, and I hope to write more about it in the coming weeks.

Defining Open Access. Again.

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Molly

Next week is Open Access Week, and as has become my tradition, I will be traveling to another university (actually, two universities this year) to give presentations on copyright, scholarly publishing, Creative Commons and open access. This morning I ran into my former copyright professor. We got to chatting, he asked what I’ve been up to, and I mentioned my busy Open Access Week. My professor, as he is fond of doing, asked a good question.

“So, what does ‘Open Access’ mean when you talk about it?”

Flustered, I said something about how the organizers of international Open Access Week tend to focus on the classic definition and scope of OA, meaning peer-reviewed scholarly articles available for free online, preferably with open licenses attached. I also explained that the institutions I visit for Open Access Week tend not to have much expertise about copyright or publishing, and so rather than talk about Open Access what I actually do is teach a basic introduction to copyright and scholarly publishing. That’s all true, but it didn’t really do justice to the question. The definition of open access, and more importantly the public understanding of what open access means, was never terribly clear, but lately it seems to be getting fuzzier. That’s what my professor was really asking about.

As more and more open movements have sprouted and expanded over the last few years – open peer review, open education, open government – it gets harder and harder to tease them apart. Open means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and we can’t assume that a roomful of people who care about openness care about the same thing. Chances are they really really don’t.

Within the Open Access movement alone there are a growing number of tactics for achieving openness, not to mention a gradual loosening of the requirements for labeling something open. On the tactics front, we have the Compact for Open Publishing Equity, flourishing institutional repositories, deposit mandates from both funding bodies and research institutions, and good old fashioned outreach to faculty. As for loosening requirements, we have been conflating Open Access with Free Online Access for years. Things got even muddier when publishers like Springer and Elsevier started offering the “Open Choice” publishing option, which gives authors the “opportunity” to pay several thousand dollars to make their work freely available online. The other night a friend of mine mentioned that she and her co-authors were given several different options from their publisher, all confusing; she knew she wanted the one that would make their work free to everyone, but wasn’t confident she could identify which option would do that. She just told her co-author to look for the one that had open in the name, and hoped she was right. It’s all a far cry from the Budapest definition.

Is it bad, this watering down of Open Access? Certainly it makes it harder to talk about. It makes it harder to brand and market. But nobody owns open. That’s the whole point. Despite the fragmentation and confusion, ultimately I think it’s probably going to be better for the public and better for our future to have lots of people approaching the problem of how to improve access to knowledge and scholarly output from lots of different angles. Names and definitions are useful for raising awareness and building community, but the ultimate goal of the open access movement is to make itself and its definitions obsolete. If this movement succeeds eventually we won’t need to distinguish between open scholarship and closed scholarship. It will all be scholarship, and it will all be accessible.

Open Ed 2010 Conference Proposal

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Molly

Over the last year I have become increasingly interested in the role of libraries and librarians in the production and publication of Open Educational Resources (OER). It seems like an area with lots of overlap in mission – improving access, sharing knowledge, supporting teaching and learning – and also one where libraries would have a lot to contribute, both in terms of expertise and infrastructure. At Michigan, we’re investigating the possibility of bringing parts of Open.Michigan, the OER operation that is currently housed in the Medical School, into the Library, and my Open.Michigan colleagues and I have collaborated on a proposal about it for the Open Ed 2010 Conference:

Abstract (aka. tweet): Many university libraries are primed to run OER and OCW shops, but no one is doing it. The University of Michigan just might lead the way.

Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER

University libraries are well positioned to run OER production and publication operations, but so far most institutions developing OER or OCW have little or no integration with their respective libraries. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, with the Library. While the U-M Library’s established publishing apparatus is larger than that of most academic libraries, many institutions share elements that would make OER integration feasible in one form or another. We propose an interactive strategy session where we present the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study.

University libraries were among the first OER producers. Early projects to digitize and share public domain materials were spearheaded by libraries in support of their missions to collect, preserve, and provide access to knowledge and information. The Making of America project was a Mellon Foundation-funded partnership among U-M, Cornell University, and the Library of Congress that created one of the first digital libraries of public domain content. Since then, the U-M Library MPublishing department has built a robust digital publishing program that includes a copyright office, an institutional repository, and an experimental unit that publishes open access scholarly journals, monograph series, public domain image collections, print-on-demand textbooks, and reprints. When it assumed responsibility for the University of Michigan Press in 2009, the U-M Library consolidated within MPublishing tremendous expertise in the skills necessary to create and publish open digital content. Recently, the U-M Library began exploring the addition of OER to its portfolio with a strategy to integrate Open.Michigan into MPublishing.

This is what makes Michigan unique. However, the key elements that university libraries share – and OER initiatives need – are infrastructure and relationships. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent OER projects. Areas where existing library infrastructure could support OER includes search and discovery, scholarly communications, assessment, metadata and indexing, and institutional repositories. Assessment skills are particularly valuable at this moment as the budget pressures that have pushed academic libraries to scrutinze how their resources and instructional services affect learning are also beginning to shape the world of OER. Meanwhile, most university libraries have a central and trusted position in the lives of faculty, students, and administrators on their campuses. Librarians support curriculum development, guide instructors to appropriate course content, and assist with research. Libraries are already at the heart of universities, which would make mainstreaming OER much easier.

When an OER shop is a stand-alone unit isolated from the day-to-day activities of students and faculty, it becomes difficult to sustain. To achieve long-term sustainability, university-based OER projects need a stable and well-funded home. Libraries could provide that home, and the University of Michigan, which has already established an ethos of sharing and a policy of open licensing in its library, is poised to figure out how.

Worlds collide: Copyright, CC, and wedding photos

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Molly

In general, I treat this blog as a professional outlet and try to keep my personal life out of it, but I had little online colliding of worlds recently and I decided it’s worth sharing here as well, with apologies for the blurring lines. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Creative Commons licenses and wedding photography for the Offbeat Bride Tribe on Ning (a private, member only space), and it got picked up by the Offbeat Bride blog. I tweeted about it, then Creative Commons tweeted about it, and I didn’t really think about how online your personal you and your professional you tend to bleed together, especially if you only use one Twitter account for everything. So now the news is out: I’m getting married. To a fellow copyright nerd. And I negotiated with our photographer to attach CC licenses to our wedding pictures. The post I wrote about the experience for Offbeat Bride is below – please keep in mind that this is written for an audience that mostly never thinks about copyright, in a context that is generally very informal. Also, I should warn you, it’s pretty long.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s worth heading over to the post on the Offbeat Bride site because the comments have been lively. Lots of photographers weighing in, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

Copyright, Creative Commons, and your wedding photos

I’m really excited by the amazing success we had negotiating with our wedding photographer around copyright, and I wanted to share what we did with the Offbeat Bride community.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I’m a librarian with a background in publishing who frequently does outreach and education about copyright. None of this is legal advice, etc.

Okay. So before I explain what our photographer is doing for us, you need a very very abbreviated introduction to copyright. (I’m sorry, I’m a librarian, I have to teach you things, I can’t help myself).

1) The purpose of copyright law is to promote the progress of science and art. Hardly anyone knows that anymore. So many people think it’s about generating profit for the music industry and giving individual artists total control over their work, but that’s just not true. Once upon a time, copyright law was balanced between the needs of creators and the needs of the public. Things have gotten really unbalanced over the last 40 years, but the goal of serving the public and promoting progress is still in there.

2) Copyright protects creative works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. This means that in order for something to be protected by copyright, it has to be recorded some way, on paper or on a hard drive some other physical thing. There are several classes of creative work that qualify for copyright protection: literary works, musical works, dramatic works, choreographic works, pictorial, graphics, and sculptural works, motion pictures and other audiovisual works, sound recordings, and architectural works.

3) Copyright does not protect ideas or facts. Those are free for anyone to use, even if it makes them look like they’re biting someone else’s style. A work has to be at least a little bit creative to qualify for copyright protection. Something that is purely factual, like a phone book, does not have enough creativity to be copyrightable even if it takes a lot of effort and hard work to make it.

4) Copyright attaches to a work automatically the moment it is recorded. There is no need to register the copyright, or to put a little (c) on it, or even claim it. If a work is relatively new (created in the last 50 years or so) creative, and recorded in some way, it’s almost definitely copyrighted. Copyright also lasts a really long time (currently, life of the creator plus 70 years after the creator dies). This means that most of what you find online is under copyright, even if there is no copyright symbol and no attribution and no source listed.

5) Copyright comes with a set of exclusive rights. These are things the copyright holder can do with the work that other people mostly cannot do (there are some important exceptions, but it would take way too much space for me to go into them here). The rights that come with copyright are: 1) The right to make copies. 2) The right to distribute copies. 3) The right to make derivative works. 4) The right to perform or display the work. The copyright holder may keep these rights to herself, or she may give some or all of them away, usually with a contract or a license.

So what does any of this have to do with your wedding photos? Everything. The way the default rules of copyright ownership work, the photographer you hire to shoot your wedding holds the copyrights in your wedding photos. She is free to sell them, publish them, Photoshop them, and share them. You are not. I hear all the time from people who believe that because they are the subjects of the photos, or because they are the ones who hired the photographer, then they are the ones who hold the copyright in the photos. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Those exclusive rights are hers, not yours.

But that’s just the default. You can change all that with the contract you sign when you hire your photographer. Most wedding photographers these days do retain the copyrights in the photos they take of your wedding, but they may give you a license to make personal, non-commercial uses of your photos. This is especially common when photographers offer a CD or DVD containing the high-res files of all your pictures. You usually have to pay extra, but a license like this means you can print copies yourself, post your pictures on Facebook, and send them to your friends, without asking for permission and without violating your photographer’s copyright. These are all good rights to have, and I highly recommend reading your contract carefully to see if you get them, and if you don’t, to ask.

For me and my boyfriend, a personal license was absolutely the bare minimum of what we would accept from our photographer. We’re both copyright nerds, and we knew we needed a license to use our own wedding pictures. But what we really wanted – and ended up getting – was more. A couple of weeks ago in the post about the XKCD save the dates, Ariel alluded to something called Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a system that allows creators to attach a license to their work that gives certain permissions to the whole world. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from. All the licenses require that whoever uses the work must attribute the creator and provide a link back to the original. Other options permit only non-commercial uses, forbid derivative works, or require people who build on a work to share the new work under the same license as the original. Many photographers, artists, musicians, and authors – including the ones who make a living from their art – now use Creative Commons licenses because they recognize that it is good for them. They always get credit as the creator, and it’s easier for people to discover and fall in love with their work when fans are free to copy and share it. I love love love Creative Commons because it has made possible a huge pool of new creative material that we are free to use and build on without worrying about copyright infringement. This is especially exciting to librarians and educators like me and my boyfriend, but anyone who loves remixes or mashups or funny cat pictures on the internet should appreciate how much better life is when people feel free to build on the creative work of others.

So back to wedding photos. Instead of a license that would just allow me and my boyfriend to use our wedding pics, we wanted a license that would allow anyone in the world to use our photos. We wanted a Creative Commons license. I really didn’t think we’d be able to convince a professional photographer to license our photos this way, but we did, and it wasn’t even that hard. First, we found an amazing photographer who already offers a personal copyright license along with the CD of high-res files. This way, we already knew we had someone who didn’t feel the need to retain complete control over the images. Once we’d gotten past the initial email exchange figuring out whether she was available, telling her how much we loved her work, describing our offbeat wedding plans, etc., I explained in an email a little bit about Creative Commons and why it was important to us, and I provided a couple of links to information where she could learn more. I was afraid we’d lose her right there, but to my surprise, she was just excited to be working with people who actually understood copyright law, and was totally open to hearing more about CC. Then we set up a phone call where we could talk about all the usual stuff you talk about with a photographer, but in addition we discussed the CC license. I explained again why it was important to us, and talked about ways in which it could be good for her as well. We agreed that it would have to be a non-commercial license – anyone who wanted to make a commercial use of a photo, like for advertising, would have to contact her for permission. Her biggest concern was that if the license was attached to high-resolution versions of the photos it would be too easy for people to make infringing uses, especially in print. Ultimately, we compromised with an agreement that we would be allowed to attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license only to low-res versions of the files. This is enough to allow for web-based reuses of our photos, but was limited enough that our photographer was comfortable giving it a try. We edited the language in her standard photographer contract to reflect the new license, and that was it.

Contracts can be intimidating and full of legalese, but it’s really worth taking the time to understand what is in your agreement with your photographer, and to negotiate for more rights if they’re not in the standard agreement. I was surprised by how much we were able to get just by asking.

If you want a concise overview of what Creative Commons is and why it is valuable, I highly recommend this video.

Molly Kleinman

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