A couple of weeks ago I attended a SINTO training event called, Ills and Document Delivery in the Web 2.0 Environment. The purpose of this day long course presented by Stephanie Taylor of Critical Eye Communications was for document supply librarians to learn more about new methods of inter-lending and the benefits of social-computing. During the event we were introduced to electronic copyright and publishing contracts, in relation to the Internet, to discuss the importance of end-users and what this means for the document supply unit of library services.
In part 1 Stephanie gave an overview of how developing technologies have effected the traditional publishing model in terms of copyright, and the role of the library as a centre of information. Inter-lending and document supply, she says, ‘do not exist in isolation, and in the environment of the new internet technologies, this is more true than ever before’.
Over the years we have seen the ILL model alter from a simple triangle of requester, library and scholar to include the printing press (publishers), aggregators, authors, and later the Internet. Today everyone (with a computer and Internet connection) has the means to publish (online) and distribution has never been so easy. Within a matter of seconds information can be sent not just nationally but internationally and has the potential to generate millions upon millions of reader. So what does this mean for copyright and who has control?
The new model of information processing has moved the practice of publication into the electronic world and consequently made it more difficult to define the roles of traditional information providers such as publishers and aggregators. Therefore it also becomes increasingly difficult to control copyright. As a result publishers have begun to offer licensing agreements to standardise the sharing of resources and have introduced ‘chest agreements’ to cover content shared between academic libraries. For items supplied via the ILL department copyright declarations are usually required for legal purposes. Likewise for aggregators information and services are packaged up into ‘bundles’ for reselling.
For the author a ‘Creative Commons‘ license was introduced to create an opportunity for them to limit how their work is used. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict certain rights of the work instead of traditional copyright licenses, which tend to be more restrictive. For example photos published on Flickr uploaded under a creative commons licence give authors the right to state under what conditions their photos are permissible to use i.e. ‘you are free to share, remix and reuse material for non-commerical purposes’.
In the second half of the course Stephanie provided an introduction to Web 2.0 technology by comparing its capabilities with ‘Web 1.0′. Based on a Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media, accredited with coining the term Web 2.0) brainstorming session Web 2.0 is generally agreed to mean ’social computing’ and it refers to web-based applications which allow users to tag, comment and collaborate on content.
During the afternoon we were set a task to discuss the experience of end-users, how web 2.0 technologies are leading to the development of personalised environments and how these may effect the role of the ILL service. A lot of the examples she used suggested that shes been listening to Dave Pattern, but I think that might just be coincidence. We discussed LibraryThing, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, Youtube and Amazon to highlight the added value of saved searches, social tags/bookmarking, recommendations, open access and RSS feeds. Like Dave, Stephanie emphasised the importance of the end-user and finished the event with a few ‘tips and tricks’ for integrating the ILL department into the library’s web presence and a list of resources/useful organisations for further information.
