Georgia Case and E-Reserves

This blog post covers:
Sanford G. Thatcher (2010). "From the University Presses--Georgia State and (Un)Fair Use: A Rebuttal to Kenneth Crews" Against the Grain, Vol. 22, No. 1.

-and-

Course related instruction from 10/01/2010, including class discussion with Carrie Kruse, College Library Director and E-Reserves maven.

I am actually feel quite fortunate that I decided to wait until after class to write my blog post for this week. Going in to class, I did not have a clear picture of what the Georgia State case really entailed. Mainly, I was thrown off guard by the discussion of the case featured in the readings for this week entitled, "From the University Presses--Georgia State and (Un)Fair Use: A Rebuttal to Kenneth Crews," written by Sanford Thatcher of the Pennsylvania State University Press. I realized immediately that this was an opinion piece, but I wasn't quite sure of the players of the Georgia State case when I read it. It was not clearly described in the article without being written to place the publishing camp in a better light than Georgia State and the other fair use floozies in academia. In addition, the article was written on a website with absurd amounts of markup and spelling errors, which made it all but unreadable. Mr. Thatcher would likely be quite unhappy to hear that I had to copy and paste the whole thing in to a plain text file just to read it, thus making a derivative copy.

There were times when I laughed out loud reading this piece, due to the vitriol with which Thatcher attacks Kenneth Crews. In fact, I was reminded at times of the people standing in Library Mall on their soapboxes, yelling down to the uncomprehending public. I became so interested in the biased arguments that I found it hard, in combination with the other readings, to get a clear view of the case. In a way, I started to ask myself the question that Crews seems to be positing to the courts: Is copyright really just the right to market the materials and and receive the funds that result from the sale of the materials? Are copies, made in good faith, and in the promotion of learning and the Arts, really able to be illegal?

But I guess I do always tend to root for the underdog.

Thus, I was very glad when we had the class discussion about the case and about main topics of E-Reserves today in class. I felt justified in my careful reading and considerations of the CONFU recommendations after reading that they cannot really be considered recommendations at all, due to the fact that no one had agreed on anything. I also felt soothed by the fact that I wasn't understanding fair use as well as I had hoped to, since there are no hard and fast rules. The first portion of class really cleared things up for me after being confused during the readings.

I felt deeply engaged with the class activity and discussion in the second part of class, which featured Carrie Kruse, the director of College Library. The classroom activity included four real-life scenarios that have happened at College Library regarding copyright and E-Reserves. It gave me a clear picture of the kinds of decisions regarding fair use that are made at a large state university, and made it clearer to me why University of Wisconsin, as well as Georgia State University, have the policies that they have. I thought the use of real scenarios and the resulting discussion was an effective way for me to learn, since it used narrative. I also always find it very interesting to hear about how librarians got to where they are today. I have often thought that E-Reserves could be a good fit for me, and I found myself gleaning more information about the day-t0-day activities of an Electronic Resources Management Librarian.