ABC Copyright Conference

Library employees routinely create content that is subject to copyright, ranging from web pages to video tutorials to photographs to social media posts. Yet in most cases these contributions are invisible, as the creativity and intellectual effort of employee authors is typically unacknowledged.  At the University of Guelph, we endeavoured to bring the works of employees into the spotlight by providing attribution on public-facing content whenever possible, while also facilitating downstream uses of their work through the use of open licenses.  In doing so, we hoped to accomplish a number of objectives:    
- to benefit employees by highlighting their expertise and enabling them to reference their creative work in their professional portfolios and resumes,
- to visibly demonstrate the library’s commitment to open by including a Creative Commons license statement on our content,
- to remedy the general lack of awareness about copyright, both within the library and in the broader university, and
perhaps most importantly:
- to model and promote respect for copyright for the university community, recognizing its significant impact on the creation and use of works in teaching, learning, research, and many other campus activities.

Establishing and implementing these new copyright-focused practices, however, was not without challenge and controversy. This session explores the obstacles we encountered in our multi-year journey to develop practices that were acceptable to both content creators and content managers, while also respecting the boundaries of institutional IP policies and collective agreements.