An interview with Rosemary Chase, Copyright Officer of GMU

When Rosemary Chase was first hired by George Mason University (GMU) more than 15 years ago, her main copyright focus was coursepacks. How times have changed. Recently, Copyright Clearance Center chatted with the GMU copyright officer to get her insight into current content usage trends and what her campus is doing to promote respect for intellectual property rights.

Excerpts:

Q: Tell us about your role at George Mason University and how it has evolved.

A: I started here in 1990 in print services. By 2000, I was hired by the libraries because they needed someone to help with all kinds of copyright permissions, not just for printing. Courseware was coming into being. People wanted to digitize things and broadcast them on TV for distance education. Now I work with a lot of people all over campus on copyright issues.

Q: Talk about some of the copyright and content usage trends and challenges you see.

A: We have a lot of electronic databases, for which we pay a lot of money. I have an objection to the fact that many of them do not address electronic reserves in their licenses. Or they specifically do not allow electronic reserve linking. I don’t know if it’s the databases or the newspapers they represent that won’t allow us to link to articles.

Another issue I’m dealing with is that we’re getting a lot more permission requests for digitized book chapters. This has caused us to examine who is taking advantage of our generosity with electronic reserves, since the library gets the permissions and pays the royalty fees. We’re paying the royalty fees, so we’re not doing anything wrong. It just seems like sometimes students should just buy the book.

Q: What other trends have you seen?

A: I’ve consulted with our coursepack producers on campus and they have seen a reduction in the use of coursepacks. For a while, it was going up and down. Some of the professors would do coursepacks and then the students would say they want the material in electronic reserves. So the professors would offer it in electronic reserves, and then they would go back to coursepacks. Now faculty can’t make up their minds which way they want to go, because they can’t please all of their students. So now we’re paying for permissions for both uses, because faculty want to make the material available to their students electronically and in coursepacks.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you face today that you didn’t have to deal with five years ago?

A: There is more courseware use, like WebCT and Blackboard. Also, people want to use more music and images and other multimedia. So that makes my life interesting.

Q: So you deal with copyright issues around the use of text material as well as other types of protected content?

A: Yes. And multimedia issues are only going to get more complicated. For example, now our music librarian is talking about streaming music into the electronic reserves system. Other universities are already doing it. Plus we’re dealing with movie rights as well, for the use of movie clips in classes.

Q: Given all the news coverage on copyright issues over the last several years, are new students more copyright-savvy than they used to be?

A: I’d like to say that it’s improved, but it really hasn’t.

Q: Can you talk about the safeguards GMU has put into place to prevent unauthorized use and distribution of intellectual property?

A: We have a copyright policy and procedures, which are readily available to anyone online. Using courseware has one set of procedures. Using electronic reserves has another. Using coursepacks has yet another. And using media has still another set. I refer to all of these guidelines and tell faculty about what their options are to legally provide materials to their students. In my workshops I remind people that the university will stand up for anyone who follows the policy. If they don’t follow the policy, they’re on their own.

To raise student awareness of copyright law and electronic reserves content, we’ve posted signs on all of the PC’s and printers in the library and labs on campus. So in addition to just posting notices on the university copy machines, we also post it on all of the PC’s.

Q: What keeps you up at night?

A: For a while, there were administrators on campus who wanted to know exactly how many people were using WebCT. We have a number, but we don’t know who is using the courseware or who is digitizing articles on it. I tried every angle I could to get that information, but finding out would be an invasion of their privacy. I am planning on doing a survey, but we have to verify that the survey would be anonymous. We really want to know how many renegades we have on campus, and where we are in terms of how far we have to go to raise awareness.

Q: How do you educate faculty and staff about the right ways to use and share protected content?

A: I’ve increased the amount and types of workshops that I give. It’s not just about copyright and coursepacks anymore. One workshop is all about media. I offer another on fair use in the digital age. I also give workshops on ways to prevent plagiarism and file-sharing. My job is to inform the university. Even though this campus has been aware, there are always new people and new students. So it’s a never-ending job.

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Everyone on campus seems to appreciate electronic course materials. After all, they are easier to distribute than paper coursepacks, and offer more convenient access than traditional library reserves. But mounting costs, including labor and copyright fees for these materials, have forced some college libraries to reconsider who will pay for this convenience in the future.

“We started out with a couple thousand dollars in 1998,” said Leah McGinnis Dunn, head of the R.B. House Undergraduate Library at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. “Since then, our copyright fees and labor costs have increased dramatically.”

Like many academic institutions, UNC does not charge student fees for e-reserves. But it is weighing all of its options for future funding of this increasingly popular service.

“We’re constantly trying to think of what we’re going to do if it goes up much beyond this year’s spending,” said Dunn. “We’ve talked about imposing limits on the number of articles that a particular course or instructor can have on per semester.”

UNC is also looking at ways to streamline the e-reserves process for its library staff. “It’s a really intensive process for our staff to have to seek these permissions and manage payment for thousands of articles every semester. We’ve talked about only paying for things that go through Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), so if it’s not in CCC’s catalog, then we won’t do it,” said Dunn. “We haven’t imposed that yet, but it’s certainly something we’d consider to help manage staff time.”

When Brigham Young University (BYU) administrators saw their e-reserve usage jump dramatically over the last three years, they too began listing possible alternate funding sources to take pressure off their library budget. “We’re looking at making the faculty more aware of the costs being incurred by them for this service, because right now it’s a seamless process,” said Susie Quartey, associate director of the Copyright Licensing Office at Brigham Young University. “They show up to reserve materials, walk away from it, and don’t have any idea necessarily that there are fees being paid.”

She shared some of the ideas BYU is exploring. “We’ve talked about providing a report on a departmental level, listing their usage and allowing them to determine if they want to set limits within their own areas,” said Quartey. “Another way is to possibly include this as a student fee. When we calculated it out, it averaged out to only a couple of dollars per student when we consider the entire student body. There’s a general university fund we could request permission to tap into for this purpose, because it’s such a necessary part of the students’ education.”

To reduce the amount of staff time required to process e-reserves, BYU developed an automated ordering system. The system allows instructors to place orders online and monitor when their requested material is available. Quartey says that eventually the system will include reporting components to enable her to pull data for annual reports and monitor usage of materials offered through her university’s e-reserve program.

Quartey, Dunn and George Mason University Copyright Officer Rosemary Chase all stressed that libraries facing the budget strain of e-reserves need the backing of their college administration. “From the very beginning, we’ve had support from the upper administration,” said Chase. “If you don’t have that, you’re really out of luck.”

Chase said her university’s e-reserves program has grown gradually over the last eight years and administrators have allocated the necessary funding so far. “I really like the idea that the library covers the costs for whoever decides to take advantage of it. That means that anybody and everybody can use it.”

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