L&LR staff blog

I visited Edinburgh University Library, which is half way through a £60 million refit.  So far, the ground, 5th and 6th floors have been completed.  To enter the ground floor, you go past a reception desk staffed by security, to a spacious area that includes an exhibition space, help desk, self service machines (with full RFID), a large core collection, group study pods, banks of fixed computers, lockers and staff areas.

Staff at the helpdesk shown above answer front line enquiries, including general information and IT enquiries, and also issue reservations and the few items that do not go through self services.

There are print and copy pods located at the same place on all floors.

There are lockers on every floor, with coin operated keys, which have proved popular with students, who are allowed to use them on a daily basis (all lockers are supposed to be empty by the time the library closes).

There are 19 group study pods, in slightly different configurations.  The screens can be moved by library staff, on request, to form a different configuration:

Students focus groups were involved in the design of the pods.

Users have access to a cafe, and are allowed to take drinks on to the ground floor only.

The Library is designed to be more quiet on the upper floor, with the 5th and 6th floors designated to support researchers (although they are also popular with undergraduates preparing for exams).

The 6th floor contains the Centre for Research Collections, a research suite, a readers’ lounge with comfortable seating, and The Wolfson Reading Room.  As much of the material is rare and valuable, there are always two members of staff on duty at all times, and extensive CCTV.

The top floors of the Library benefit from views of the Pentland Hills and Arthur’s Seat:

The 5th floor contains extensive archive stores, including rare book collections, (they were a deposit library until the 19th century), a digital imaging unit, a conservation service and staff offices.  There is also an environmentally controlled viewing room, designed for showing material to visitors.

Throughout, they have used refurbished shelves, with new coloured acrylic shelf ends.  They still use the Arne Jacobsen chairs purchased in the 1960s, when the Library was built:

You may have seen a photograph of Christine Keeler posing on a chair like this…

We also looked at the floors that are still to be converted, to get some idea of the extent of the transformation – it will be interesting to return when it has been completed.

Academic librarians are unhappy that some of the UK’s largest university business schools are being asked to pay extra to be allowed to link to articles published in a key journal in their field.

Harvard Business Review (issn:0017-8012), published by HBP (Harvard Business Press), has long been available as part of the EBSCOhost Business Source suite of databases.

However, in an email to the chair of the BBSLG (British Business Schools Librarians Group), EBSCO outlined that, as a vendor of HBP’s content, they are obliged to disable persistent linking to Harvard Business Review, at the publisher’s request.

According to EBSCO, the terms & conditions of their supply of HBP content have always included a clause limiting use of the journal to individual, private study, and explicitly prohibiting linking from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for teaching purposes.

Three libraries have already had their facility to create persistent links removed, according to the BBSLG, who have written a letter of complaint to EBSCO.

A flyer circulated by EBSCO ‘invites’ individual BBSLG member-libraries to upgrade their EBSCOhost Business Source subscriptions to a level which would “continue to allow [the institution] to persistent link to HBR articles for an additional annual fee“: each institution’s fee being calculated on past use of the journal and their business-school student numbers.

For one, Russell Group, UK university, EBSCO have demanded £15,000 in order that the institution be allowed to go on creating persistent links for use in teaching.

According to correspondence between EBSCO and the BBSLG, Harvard Business Press are concerned that unauthorised persistent-linking from VLEs to EBSCOhost has harmed HBP’s separate provision of course packs for HEIs on a commercial basis. They cite a “direct quantifiable link between the two which can be clearly demonstrated financially between the diminishing course pack use and persistent linking“.

Should institutions decline the opportunity to pay the additional EBSCOhost fee, EBSCO asks that they inform their users that persistent-linking from a VLE to the HBR is not permitted, and that EBSCO may disable the ability to create such links.

This will not only remove the ability of academic staff to create links from a VLE, but also break any persistent links to the e-journal created by individuals in the course of their own personal study or research.

~~~

This is a retrograde step for usability in online scholarly content. Storing, recalling, and broadcasting stable hyperlinks is fundamental to the Web. It is not an add-on or a luxury.

Private, subscription-only environment it may be, but users of EBSCOhost [remembering that this includes fee-paying students] have had the rug pulled from under a basic Web experience. It may currently affect only one journal title, in one database, but this is a dangerous precedent, and one that the library community has a right to question and challenge.

Paul

Lis-copyseek is a closed discussion list for copyright permission seekers to share information and experience.  On 5 March 2009, some of the leading lights on lis-copyseek organised a copyright seminar held at the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester. Professor Charles Oppenheim from Loughborough was in the chair.

Jason Miles-Campbell from JISC Legal spoke on third party copyright in E theses and repositories. How far does the law go? Theses are built on the work of others so you would expect third party material to be used. Definitions of key terms such as fair dealing and substantiality would be helpful. Insubstantiality may justify the inclusion of ’snippets’.

Alma Hales from the Open University spoke about risk assessment  in using third party copyright images. Alma heads a team responsible for copyright clearance for the OU. All their records are kept on a Access database and they know exactly at what stage any transaction is at any time. The OU and the BBC have a close relationship. We watched an extract from the Hollywood Science programme (in Die Hard, could Bruce Willis have saved the world with a singlet and a hosepipe – see http://www.open2.net/science/hollywood_science/) as an example of where Alma had not permitted the inclusion of irrelevant film footage.

Toby Bainton from SCONUL talked about Gowers: the European angle. (The Gowers review of intellectaul property was published in 2006). The European Union Copyright Directive of 2001 harmonised rights across the EU but did not harmonise exceptions. The Directive was formally reviewed in 2007. There was a Green Paper in 2008. In January 2009 a report on copyright by European MEP Manual Medina Ortega was approved which has led to protests from libraries, internet service providers and consumers. It includes the ‘Sarkozy three strikes’ proposal (where three infringements would lead to the withdrawal of access). Go to http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sidesSearch/search.do?type=REPORT&language=EN&term=6&author=1337 for access to the report.

Murray Weston, Chief Executive of the Britsh Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) covered the re-use of video from websites. He covered recent BUFVC licensing and content work. He mentioned BoB (Box of Broadcasts), and TRILT (Televison and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching). Go to http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/ for more information. He had been involved in a consultation on Developing a copyright agenda for the 21st century with the Intellectual Property Office (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/c-policy-consultation.pdf).

Charles Oppenheim’ s presentation was on Web 2.0, new ways of teaching and learning and the copyright issues they raise. He was involved in a JISC-funded project Web2Rights (http://www.web2rights.org.uk/). His presentation covered exceptions, restricted acts, infringement, moral rights, Web 2.0 applications, other legal issues, and getting started with a new teaching project.

The last speaker was David Anderson-Evans from UUK on the UUK role in negotiating with licensing bodies. He described the process of negotiating the latest CLA licences. The user guidelines at 24 pages were the same length as the licence. There are two working groups, one on data collection by the CLA, and one on secondary publishing.