Politics and Fair Use

I read an interesting article on fair use, YouTube, and John McCain this morning in Library Journal's Academic Newswire. It seems that the McCain campaign recognizes the strong contribution that YouTube videos make towards the political process. YouTube, as a result of their continuing legal battle with Viacom, has been very quick to comply with DMCA takedown notices. The McCain campaign has asked YouTube to investigate more closely the request that come regarding political material. So far, Google/YouTube have maintained that this would be impossible. The LJ article notes how this is just another example of how fair use faces numerous challenges in the current climate. Librarians and educators depend on a robust fair use protection of free speech. Looks like I'm on John McCain's side on this one.

Meebo on the library website

I continue to be amazed at how well Meebo works as a way to connect with our clients.

This is my second week working the reference desk from two to four on Tuesday afternoon and both days someone has contacted us (I was on desk today with Marcus, our student worker and he got the question) using the Meebo widget we have on the library homepage.Today someone wanted to know if we had a scanner in the library, which we answered that we did. Then about ten minutes later, a non-traditional student came in. I ended up helping him do the scanning. I thought it all the more impressive since it was one of our older students. This really must have appeal for a range of ages.

CUWL Conference

Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester opened up the meeting with an introduction to efforts on their campus to learn more about how students live, work and research. Working with a staff anthropologist they have used ethnographic study techniques to learn how the libraries might better serve students. Many of the things they did are replicable at McIntyre. Ideas that I heard were attracting students to focus groups using $5 and food. They didn't sit around speculating what students need, they asked them. They redesigned their website by giving students mockups of their site and having them circle what was good, writing in what was missing and X-ing out what was useless. Because of what they learned about students and their relationship with their parents, they focused on parents during orientation programs instead of overwhelmed students. They hosted a parent breakfast. Another thing that we could adapt was putting white boards in all the group study rooms and placed movable white boards around the library.

Other highlights:

• The new Library Dynamics software will allow us to compare our collection with others in the System and other libraries across the country. It looked pretty easy to do but no one really knows all the details about the software yet.
• The document delivery project has opened up more questions about how best to provide access to scholarly material for our faculty. Possibilities include ILL credit cards, everyone joining RAPID interlibrary loan (Madison and Milwaukee use it and praise it), and spreading the funds to more publisher websites.
  
• Madison will go directly to publishers rather than pay copyright costs when ordering material that would incur those charges.
• The credit cards require more fiscal management time but seem to facilitate document delivery.