Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Copyright & Blackboard

Hello everybody. Did you all get the mass e-mail about Blackboard adding a copyright permissions building block? The e-mail links to an article in "Inside Highered.com" that says:

"The Copyright Permissions Building Block...will allow professors at the 1,200 colleges that use Blackboard's course management system, to automatically tap into the copyright center's authorization process...to make it easier for faculty...to get permission to use the materials they chose."

Forgive all the ... but I just wanted to put in the necessary to text to convey the author's meaning. Seems like he is saying that Blackboard will have a component that will let users tap into the Copyright Clearance Center's approval process for copyrighted material.

Anybody looking into this at Hopkins? Seems like it would be useful to allow faculty to post articles directly in Blackboard. Are there any cons to it I wonder?

2 comments:

Woodson said...

I haven't heard about it but will look around. Makes a lot of sense. We have a really, really clunky home-made e-reserves system. Faculty using Blackboard could jump ship and post their own.

Susan Payne said...

Hi Sue,

Found an interesting counter argument: http://susans411.info/?p=19

What to do? I think it would be great if professors could easily post articles into Blackboard. But this counter article raises a good point...should every article have to go through the CCC to be used? What if the instructor only wants to use a portion of the article and not the whole thing?

I'm revising my library's ILL policy and am realizing how complicated copyright and fair use really are to sort through.

Of course, since it came from Congress should we be surprised???