Category: access

I’m not talking much about copyright in my talk, but I have been boning up on some of the Australian library community’s responses to the Australia – United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) which passed in May. One of the things that AUSFTA did was “reduce differences” between US and Australian copyright law which, as you can probably guess, means the Australians get to tighten up their laws and bring them more in line with restrictive US laws that favor business uses of intellectual property over community and library uses. To this end, the Australian Libraries’ Copyright Committee released this Statement of Principles [word doc] which says, among other things

I’ve been reading more writing by Australian librarians lately which, of course, I should have been doing all this time. Jennifer Cram writes great stuff, my favorite so far is Ten Questions to Ask About Filtering Software. Sharp questions deserving of serious answers for anyone who is considering filtering.

As an outreach librarian, I try to figure out why people aren’t coming to the library. Some of these reasons are obvious: can’t park, bad hours, building too cold, don’t read…. When I get to answers like “don’t read” my next question is always “why not?” The answers are all over the map, but the one that drives me the craziest — since I work with a lot of seniors — is “can’t find large print titles in anything that interests me”. Now, our library has maybe a thousand large print titles, even some new ones, which is not a bad collection for a library our size. It’s mostly fiction. Non-fiction circulates less, and it’s also harder to get. Our largest request that comes to me is “more computer books in large type” followed by “more poetry” If you’re blind in the US, you can get books on tape delivered to you for free, but you often can’t choose the exact titles [think Netflix] and you don’t get the tactile experience of reading which many people really like. According to the Royal National Institute of the Blind in the UK 96% of all books are not available in large print, audio or braille editions. They have started a Right to Read campaign complete with arresting graphics and sound clip by Michael Palin, to raise people’s awareness of lack of access to reading materials for the blind and otherwise visually impaired. [pscott]

I wish everyone could work out their trademark and copyright animosity as well as The Postal Service and The US Postal Service have. Witness this ugly series of events [with follow-up] concerning a copy of Gone with the Wind that used to be on a Project Gutenberg Australia site.

Who holds the copyright to the Universe? Back cover image of the inaugural issue of the Public Library of Science’s second magazine PLoS Medicine. [mathowie]