Thursday, September 6, 2012

Copyright restrictions require creativitiy

On August 27th, I attended a new faculty orientation at the University of Saskatchewan.  One of the speakers in the afternoon shared an active learning technique that I knew would be perfect for integration into a library instruction session.  The speaker gave one side of the classroom a syllabus created for an undergraduate class while the other side of the classroom was given a syllabus for a graduate class.  Once you had the syllabus in hand, students were instructed to pair up with someone on the opposite side of the classroom and discuss the layout, the content, etc. 

ah ha!  THE perfect activity for comparing and contrasting scholarly journals with popular magazine... Except....

With copyright restrictions, instructors are not allowed to distributed multiple copies of a journal article within a classroom without prior approval from the copyright holder; even if you have the students return the copies at the end of the class.  I know this because I was on the copyright/usage rights communication team.  So what can I do?

Well, I ended up embedding the links to two articles into a LibGuide for the course.  I will instruct students to click on the links and retrieve the article that way - thus compiling with copyright.

If there were no computers in the classroom... now that would be an exercise in creativity!

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