While the purpose of the use may be nonprofit and educational, if the materials are entertaining movies, if they are watched or delivered in their entirety, and if the users no longer feel the need to rent or buy the movies, 3/4 of the criteria of fair use are unfulfilled. This creates huge exposure for universities, both from Netflix and from film companies.Read the whole post which includes numerous links back to librarians on the issue.
Andy Woodworth, at Agnostic Maybe (a great title, I think), put his finger on the issue when he says "I believe that the actions of these libraries and librarians are a symptom of a larger issue for the profession: the coping (or non-coping) with the expansion of licensed content as part of the collection." He has a lot more to say, and there are some great comments.
The second topic burning up electrons among librarians is the issue of outsourcing. In this case the outsourcing of the management of public libraries. It is an issue which was hot in the late 1990s (pre-blogging), so I guess it is not a surprise to see it come up again.
On one of the discussion lists, Pat Schmann (ALA Past President and the Schuman in Neal-Scumann Publishing), sent a link to her article called: The selling of the public library: It's not just ‘outsourcing,’ it's privatization. The article appeared in Library Journal back in 1998. It is worth re-reading. (It is an eight[8] page PDF file.]
I picked up this post on the issue which is a long, and thoughtful post on the issue. There is much more in the PUBLIB archives.
I also ran across this post in another non-library blog.
Miscellaneous other links:
- I found this great blog post about how to check out a web page.
- Roy Tenant offers some thoughts on managing change. There are some insightful comments as well.
