 Melissa Levine, and Michigan Library. And we feel like we're going to try and have a conversation with you this morning about an initiative that we've had going for a little bit of time now. And it is a conversation that we actually started at the last CNI meeting in a virtual world. And I hope that, given that we are not huge numbers this morning, we can actually talk to you and try to answer your questions. And please feel free to even interrupt us as we go through a bit of an update on this initiative that we've had going for some time. OK, here we go. So I'm going to start off trying to bring you all up to speed by pushing us or pulling us back to really the origins of this initiative. And this idea has been percolating for many, many years. We were talking about it, in fact, last night. The initiative was born with a number of us working as faculty with OCLC in 2003. There was a little bit of leftover grant money from an IMLS digitization grant. And it was seen fit to try and teach cultural heritage professionals about how to deal with rights issues in the course of digitization. And from that, it turned into a dog and pony show. We went from one or two workshops workshops held at least four times a year for a period of four years. So we were able, because of demand, to take this little pot of money and just grow it into this experience where we went from meeting to meeting and we would hold pre-workshop meetings. And we understood that there was just such a need for education. Fast forward to 2016 and 17, we were able at Columbia to get a lyricist catalyst fund grant to determine and ascertain what need was all those years later. Were we in the same place? Were we going through the same experience over and over again trying to learn about copyright as a Copyright 101 course? And what, in fact, we learned was that we were spinning our wheels in the cultural heritage community. We were, whether library, archive, and museum, we kept on trying to learn the same subject at a very base level over and over again. And this was happening all over the country and in a very disjointed, disconnected way. In 2019, we were fortunate enough to get a Sloan Foundation grant to bring a number of people to Columbia for a two-day period in July and create a conversation about how we could try to work collaboratively to bring these disparate educators together to enable us to come up with a more systematic way of learning about the subject so that we could actually raise the conversation in the community. The idea being that we really cannot be part of change and affect change in how rights issues are dealt with in the management of our collections and in the preservation and access to our collections unless we really understood subject matter, we were in a very interesting space because we alone really understood our collections and the need, and yet we needed the Intellectual Property Foundation in order to understand how to navigate those waters. And what we didn't want was the Intellectual Property Expert community to be telling us, in fact, what we could not do. And that's exactly what the landscape was and continues to be. Then the pandemic hits and we end up in a place where everything is accelerated. We are told, for example, at Columbia, Melissa could tell you what it was like at Michigan, but we were told within a 48-hour period we were going remote. And everything was shutting down. And all of a sudden, our whole world got shifted into the digital. And so it was necessary to, in fact, try and provide some level of expertise and understanding what it really meant to all of a sudden take all these collections that we tiptoed around from a rights perspective and provide immediate access to them. What were our risks? How do we justify it? What were, in fact, the right status of all these materials that we've been preserving in a digital form but now have to provide access to them as well? And so we decided with Lyrisis that we needed to do something about it. And so from that and the discussions and the roundtable report, you can see some of the materials in front of you on the screen, we created, in a very quick form, a pilot. How do we get copyright education to library archives and museums when we're physically closed in a way that starts to make sense so that they can understand how to ascertain risk and how, more importantly, to provide lawful access so that we could actually achieve our mission even when our buildings were closed? So we created the pilot and we recruited these wonderful people to go on this journey with us and develop what was very, very quickly five courses online, which we taught, in fact, in the spring of 2021 and in the fall of 2021. So we just finished the second round. Melissa and Heather Briston from UCLA taught Copyright 101. And I have to tell you, it was this experience much like trying to sell Rolling Stones tickets. The platform, at Larissus, could only manage 300 registrants. We had waiting lists. It was out of control. And even the advanced courses received an unbelievable amount of attention. By advanced, we mean that we took this base course and said, OK, what are the issues that are really important to enable remote access to collections? What do we really need to understand? And you can see the names of the courses on your screen. And we reached out to a cohort of faculty that we knew and trusted and understood could really dive into the details and the complexities with ease so that this wasn't just a webinar with talking heads. This was an opportunity to ask questions, to bring real-life problems to copyright experts who understood the cultural heritage field. So what happened? This is our pilot. Five courses taught twice over a six-month period. So as I said, we kind of broke the platform because we educated over 1,600 people in about six to seven months. And the overwhelming registration was for Melissa's course. And it was the copyright 101. So that told us something. That told us that just the base knowledge is, in fact, lacking in a consistent way with a certain integrity. We understood that, in fact, if there is a registration fee that's nominal, it seems to be overcome because registration was pretty robust on the rest of the courses. And that, in fact, through evaluation, we understood that over 65% of those who registered for the classes wanted to be part of an online community. Where do you go for questions? The answer is to your questions. So pilot takeaways. It means that collaboration works. We have figured out that if we bring a cohort of recognized IP experts in the cultural heritage field, we're going to get registration numbers. People recognize who they are, from what institutions they come, and it's a real opportunity to learn, particularly where, if at your own institution you don't have ready access to this kind of recognized expertise. And this idea, I remember many years ago, when I worked for, in the dot-com era, I was at the Museum of Modern Art, and we were asked to create a for-profit subsidiary of art and culture. And they brought McKinsey in. And McKinsey said to us, nothing good is free. If it's free, it has to be bad. So therefore, we're going to charge you only 20% of our regular fee, because we are good, in what we do. This presumption is actually false. For our community, it is false. Free is something that removes a barrier of access to knowledge, and at the same time, provides an ease of entry to our community that is absolutely lacking. And in an environment where we are really watching our pennies and budgets are tight, even a $75 registration fee might be too much to expect from anyone wishing to learn. We learned that the courses themselves are the values in the human interaction. The value is in the Q&A. The value is in a workshop. The value is not in a recording. And the truth is that we need to make all the recordings of our sessions absent the Q&A for free and open. This is not an endeavor where we're trying to earn income. We're just simply trying to keep going. We also learned that there were, in fact, three audience. Educators need support. For those educators that are, in fact, reaching audience in a meaningful way, and I think of a colleague of ours that's on the board. This is Kyle Courtney from Harvard, who has a program called Copyright First Responders. He is one person trying to operate at scale. And he's not burnt out yet because he has an enormous amount of energy. But it really is kind of overwhelming to try and mobilize an entire country of first responders. Cultural heritage experts need the intellectual property expertise because funders are now expecting us to have it. If you apply for a grant, they want to know what your rights plan is in the course of digitization. And then finally, our audience are the institutions themselves. If you're at an institution where you can't afford Melissa or me, but you need the expertise, oh, yeah, well, I know. That's another conversation. But we could have that conversation this morning, if you wish. Really, you need to be able to train up your staff. You need your staff to have a place to go to ask questions so that you can start in housing the expertise without having to pay for additional FTE. It's the knowledge that's really important. So finally, in terms of sustainability, what we've been doing in this pilot, which we are now going to continue and launch, there's a very basic way you can provide these opportunities to ask questions and to learn. I mean, we all are at point where we've got Zoom exhaustion, but we can do this. It doesn't take an enormous amount of money to hold Zoom sessions where it's like the doctor is in. Come ask your questions. Come learn about a subject. We'll give you the quick and dirty in 30 minutes, and let's have a conversation. And then, as I said before, you don't want to create barriers of entry to knowledge. You want to make the recordings available for free. And for those sessions where we would like to do something a little more innovative, perhaps podcasts, create more learning materials and tools, if you think of my predecessor Kenny Cruz at Columbia created the copyright fair use checklist as an example of a tool, we can adopt the approach that The Guardian takes, which is pay what you can. And leave it to the community to decide at what level they wish us to play. So this is so community driven. We also recognize that we have to work with other organizations that service our community, whether it's AAM, whether it's ALA, and others to try to reach you, to try to ascertain what, in fact, are the important issues of the day, and try to work with these organizations for very targeted reasons, and to identify key partners over time. The only place where we think we are going to need significant funding is to go back to that old OCLC model where we're able to hold a couple of copyright workshops as a pre-conference experience and include the live with the online. Because as we're learning even today, there's so much more that you can learn in person. And we've certainly learned that over the course of the last almost two years. We're trying to figure out a sustainable model for this. Because right now, this is something that it's partly a passion project. It's partly, Rena didn't explain this, but both of us are lawyers by training. And we've both been in the sort of cultural heritage community for, I'd say, 30 years-ish. Let's leave it at that. And we've been working on different versions of the same problem for a really long time. And it was very striking to me to listen to Cliff's comments yesterday in our first session and how many of the things that he was talking about touched on either copyright or what we're calling copyright adjacent issues. There are issues of contract. I do think that the issues of surveillance and contracts and things like that are a next step. We need to deal with some basics first. But I personally would like to stop having the same conversation that I've been having since 1996 and have my colleagues have basic competence and basic confidence in their decision-making. To get something right or something wrong, aside from criminal intent and copyright, is really a matter of a judgment call. So what is responsible? What is mission-driven? What's aligned with the law as well as you can? Because the law isn't going to give direct instructions for much other than stop at the red light, don't stop at the red light. I don't know why. Maybe it is the intangible nature of copyright. But it seems to strike a lot of anxiety into people who are trying to make decisions. Cliff didn't use this expression of a virtual reading room, but this is an idea that Rena and I have been talking about for a long time. That language is starting to get picked up in a number of places in different ways. But this issue of being able to access special collections material remotely is only going to become more and more important. And I'm seeing my colleague Winston Tapp here. I'm reminded a couple years ago, I had the privilege of being on a panel at WIPO. And there were a number dealing with libraries, museums, and archives. And there are a number of people from places like Dominican Republic who were talking very movingly about the issues of global warming that they're dealing with, the security of their collections. And I don't think this comes as a shock to anyone in this room, but it is really strange to think about our heritage in this additionally complex kind of way. Anyway, copyright is a, I'd like to think of it as a stewardship issue, but I'd like to be able to talk about some of the harder issues. And these are mostly fundamental kinds of things. I do not know why it is so difficult, but it is. And we're trying to figure out, I think I'm rambling a bit, we really are trying to figure out how to do this at scale while we also have full-time jobs. We've thought about things like looking for a home institution. It could be something, I'm seeing Morris here, like the BTA would be an interesting possibility, clear as a possibility. There's a number of different places that have a role in facilitating collective work together. But mostly, and one of the reasons we really wanted to have this session in person was to elicit a conversation with you about business model. I also wanted to mention something about pedagogy. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. And Rina. We knew we had to take the pilot and make it relevant and real. So we appointed a new board. And we're doing this all because we're giving in kind. There is no pot of money at the end of the rainbow. We've just decided, all of us on this board, to give our time to start this conversation, to engage at the community grassroots level, and to see how it will be sustained over time. Maybe we're just going to be on Zoom and trying to answer questions for a really long time before we're taken to the next level. Or it could be that institutionally, folks come together and say, listen, we need your expertise and we can't afford to hire people. But we can't afford to give you a little bit of money to up the game. Let's see where this goes. So the new board, you'll see some names that you saw on the last list. But Jonathan Cain, who's my AUL at Columbia, has been appointed to the board. And he's a wonderful new addition to Columbia as well. Kyle Courtney is there again from Harvard. Sharon Farb, who was there from the very beginning from UCLA. Dave Hansen at Duke, who runs something called the Library Copyright Institute that is IMLS grant funded for HBCUs and community colleges in the tech triangle in North Carolina is part of our board because, in fact, his initiative is so grounded in the same vision and the same mission that, in fact, this initiative is grounded in. And then there's Melissa and myself, of course. We've added Margaret McKee, who is at the Menel in Houston, Texas. She's the digital asset manager and chairs the Intellectual Property Special Interest Group for an organization called the Museum Computer Network. Carla Myers, who does that wonderful online conference called the Library's Copyright Conference Live. She's done it online. And the budget is almost a nominal issue for the interest that the community has in creating learning opportunities. And then finally, there's Ann Young. Ann is just from the Murgies Council. She's also written much about the subject in the museum space. And she's the editor of a book that I think should be on everyone's shelf called the Rights and Reproductions Handbook. So that is our new advisory board. And that's the power of the board. And this is the piece that's so important because it is why folks registered to attend these conferences. It's because of the power of the folks that are coming together to try and bring you the education. You know, we have zero branding in the space as an entity, but this is who we are. And this is who is, in fact, giving in kind to the rest of the community to try to up the game for all of us. So next steps. We're going to launch a website in January. And we're going to try to get that information to all of you when we launch. The University of Michigan is kindly being the host for the site and seems to be a home that we're gravitating towards. And we're going to remain values driven. You know, we've heard this, I think, over and over again. There was a session yesterday where we were talking about OA presses and their space in the university press community and how, in fact, if they just shifted thinking for the press, all of a sudden the pieces started to fall into place. And so when you talk about sustainability, this is not an opportunity to make money. This is also, you know, we're lucky. We're at a point where we could deliver some very base education in a way that's not very expensive anymore. And so the idea here is let's just get the education out there and worry about the bells and whistles as we start to maybe bring in a little money to hold a pre-conference workshop somewhere. It also turns out we're not graphic designers. So maybe somebody else could pay somebody. Melissa and I are designing the website. It's been an interesting ride. It's been interesting. We have to build access to copyright education as an equity driver. So what's happening out there is schools like Michigan and Columbia can afford people like us. But what about all those other institutions that can't? And does that mean that they have less access to knowledge as a result? Are they experiencing that assessment that I've seen for so many years? Oh, it's in the copyright era. It's got to go on a lockdown laptop in the reading room. And that's it. And then, you know, release the recordings for free. This was something that was really apparent to us. Make them open. You know, CC by, let's just let them go. And I say stay human because there's nothing like learning in an interactive environment, whether online or in person. This idea of the talking heads in a webinar is just exhausting. And I would hazard a guess that we probably retain 20% of what we hear and see in a webinar. So this is our to-do list. We have to develop a communication strategy. We have to get the word out to you. You cannot build a website and they will come. That's the 1990s approach to the internet. It doesn't work. We have our immediate interest for spring is to create a couple of workshops based on the advanced subjects that we've been exploring. And, you know, we've already got the recordings that are out there. Use them as sort of pre-reads or previews before you come into a workshop so you have that kind of base knowledge. Hold online interviews with a Q&A session. Have someone who's an expert, let's say, in preservation, audio-visual preservation and copyright, interview them for 20 minutes, and then engage in a bunch of questions and answers. Identify collaborators with whom to work on key initiatives. We've been doing that. And use data and metrics. There's a colleague of ours who is doing some amazing research right now, a deep dive into data about what we know as a community concerning rights, what we need to know, who, in fact, knows it based on the positions held in our various institutions. And it really starts to drive an in-depth understanding of, in fact, where the need is greatest. So thank you for listening. And we're open to as many questions as you might have about where we're going with this next. So I wanted to add a couple things as well. It's funny when you put together a slide deck, what you're so close to your own work that you don't realize what you're not addressing. But some of the fundamental things, Rena and I both worked in and with museums and libraries. And we felt it was very important that this initiative address copyright from the convergence perspective, looking at museums, libraries, and archives. Because the copyright issues are the same. But you can have an entirely different conversation about the exact same copyright concept with someone from an art museum and someone from an archive. We attempted to pair, try to have two speakers for each of the five, the programs that we did. And we tried to pair people with different sort of perspectives. So Heather, my colleague at UCLA, who was my partner, she works in the library, but she's an archivist. And so that in planning our session, that helped us flesh things out. The other thing we did was, and I'm entirely guilty of this, when I start a basic copyright 101 talk, I talk about United States code, Section 17, and go into the law and the structure of the law. And when we practiced our initial script with Rena and my other colleagues, they're like, that is the most boring thing I ever heard. And it doesn't engage. So we stepped back and tried to design a pedagogy that's really much more about what are the problems you're trying to solve? What's the activity that you're trying to do? And we focused much, almost not at all, on the structure of the law. That could be something else, but it's not as helpful and it's not as engaging as the storytelling hook for problem solving. We used things like legal cases without discussing them as cases, but we treated them as scenarios for explaining how you might or might not approach something. So the convergence piece, I think, is a very important point. I will say, this is my sense of the comments that we got, is that people in each of these three fields think they're all very, very different from each other, which is interesting. Let's see. Well, it tells us that there's less understanding of the issues if everyone thinks their issues are very distinct, because you only start to really understand the crossover when, in fact, you really start to understand the legal issues in a more in-depth way. For so many of us that work in institutions that have these robust, very varied collections, I mean, the word libraries at Columbia is a misnomer because we have archival collections, we have object-based collections, we have it all, and at the same time, there's one copyright person, and I'm seeing the similarities right across the line. And in that first study, our consultant, Kristen Kelly, who undertook the study for us, which was funded by Lyrisis, she said, oh, this is same, same, but different. It's same, same, but different. Do you have any questions? And also, is this being recorded for...? It is, okay, so you do need to use the mic. Sorry, Mimi, go ahead. That's okay. So, I like what you're saying, and I agree, this question of the audiences and the level of distinction between the different audiences. And I really like the approach of moving to a storytelling model in terms of reaching out to, certainly, the librarians and archivists that I work with, I can see how that sort of running through Section 17 is... It's the most exciting. But the audience, the other audience that is out there is that sort of is the lawyers, right? It's the general counsel layer. At some point, we can have a lot of conversations within the libraries. At some point, it all is going to have to go to that general counsel layer, and you're gonna have to be able to put it back into the languages, into the language of, well, this is fair use, and here's my fair use analysis. So, I wonder about how we effectively integrate that into the conversation. One of the things that we talk about more informally, like woven into these sessions, is how do you talk to your general counsel? And frequently, the general counsel, in many universities, there are people who have dealt with real estate. We have many universities today, do have people who have copyright expertise, certainly privacy, increasingly, but sometimes there's nobody, and this copyright is like this other thing that you guys can figure out. So, we didn't do this formally, we did it sort of intuitively, is how do you talk to your general counsel? Because I think there's another layer of network where the general counsels are all talking to each other at their professional meetings about what's okay, like what are you doing, what are we doing? And they're using different language. Well, and there's different risk thresholds for different universities for all kinds of reasons. And so, there's not going to be, I don't think one set of outcomes, like Rena and I, and I would say this is true for the philosophy of our group. We're not expecting there to be like one approach for everyone, just that there are ways of making informed decisions. And frequently, I think with lawyers, they can read the law and get the fabric of that piece quickly. What they don't know is what you're trying to do and why they may have, there's still this like libraries are just books, right? Or why do we need libraries? We have Google. There's still like those are gaps that we need to fill without being patronizing really. No. For lawyers so that they can be better supports for us. So that's something we've talked about a lot, but we haven't done it, we haven't like put it as an intentional thing. Maybe we should. I think it should be a workshop. How do you deal with your general counsel? And you know, some counsel want you to tell them what the section is. If you're dealing with a fair use case, here's my four factor analysis as they said. And some don't. Some want to hear the facts. And you have to read your general counsel to understand it. So what we have to give you in terms of education is you need to understand that there's a four factor analysis on what the four factors are. And this is the section. And these can be your complications, but the complications are so dependent on facts that we need to get you to a productive space with your counsel so that the counsel's response is not no, which is everyone's concerned, right? And it's also talking to them, like building a relationship before or instead of having a problem because if you're at their office because there's already a problem, you know, the whole thing's failed. And then you're a problem. And you don't want to be there. No. Thank you. So I was glad, because Mimi touched on the general counsel piece, which was right at the top of my list is, you know, how do we address them and manage them in some ways, right? Because yes, and I think the other aspects where that I've seen an area of expertise is contracts, right? And are they, you know, which can be helpful because I was glad Melissa mentioned that. I feel like that's a whole other area that we need to deal with as a profession that it's actually one of the greatest risks we face as a profession, because we are doing all kinds of license agreements all over the place. And very few of us have a granular understanding of what's in them. Do you have a filing system? Let's start with that. That's good, okay. Yeah. Not a given. No, exactly. One, that's it. And you know, is there paper files that are digital file, all of those things? I think just wanted to make the point and they're same, same, different. That there are state implications, particularly for state institutions. Sure, that's already on your radar, but just to put it on the record, so to speak. And then, less a question than a suggestion that I feel like, as is true in so many cases, DEI work has a model here that could be useful. I'm thinking particularly of an organization called Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, I don't know if you're familiar with this model, but they do onsite in-person workshops with the intent that everybody who attends will then hold an onsite in-person workshop at their home institution, right? That's part of the commitment of attending the workshop. And part of the commitment is that the workshop will be open to the broader community, not just people at that institution. And so the focus is building and spreading a culture of awareness around the issues that are relevant to that community. And I feel like maybe it's too touchy-feely for general counsels, I don't know, but you might be able to get people attending and participating in these things. It's also an opportunity because institutions that can afford to send people for a week-long in-person conference then can support institutions in the area that can't send people. So that's another piece going to the principle of equity underline your value. So I just suggest that as a potential model for scaling your efforts. Thank you. Those are really good suggestions because scalability is one of our main objectives here, right? I know that Kyle in his work with Copyright First Responders has now started to take it to the second level where he's holding the trainers session where then he seeds the knowledge regionally or locally. And the idea then is that those folks take over the conversation in their area. Again, it's his need to scale being a person of one that's trying to do this. But it is all going to be community-driven. I mean, we as a board want to seed this and then see how far we can push it and then see if technology can assist us in trying to get there, too. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. I have a couple of comments and then a question. So I want to pick up on the advisory board and particularly one of the points about general counsel. Some of us are very fortunate to have general counsels who really get it and who are not risk averse. And I think tipping into that group and finding someone to augment the board would be very important. I would also say something I've learned based on my international experiences is that we know that many librarians also operate archives and think of themselves as being in one universe, as Melissa mentioned. But we also know that archivists think of themselves often very differently from libraries. So I would suggest, again, on the advisory board to have someone who identifies explicitly as an archivist. But my question is that it's a very interesting presentation about what you're talking about, but it's really focused on what is and not what ought to be. So of course, my question is, is there an advocacy role for changing the what is as part of the goal here? It's interesting you would ask that. So ultimately, we've had this debate. We had this debate during the pilot. And we're continuing to have this debate. And so is our mission ultimately advocacy or is our mission education? And I'm going to argue that it's the same thing, because we can't advocate for change what ought to be until we have the knowledge requisite in the community to come up with very interesting solutions. We need a sandbox. But in order to get in the sandbox, we need the tools and the toys to build the castle. And we're not there yet. And this is what's so frustrating for so many of us who've been working in this field for so long. It's back to that same conversation over and over again. The faces change. The issues don't. And that's what's just the driver for this. So we're saying education first, but the purpose ultimately is to affect change. The other issue that's so interesting in trying to bring these three sectors together. Museums are in a place where they can't hard lobby because of taxation reasons. They're very fixed in their perspective concerning this. So we have to, in order to accommodate, channel ourselves accordingly. But that doesn't mean that we can't have relationships with advocacy organizations. And I think that is the necessary piece. Can we be the education arm, you know, or at least one of them? There's so much growth in the advocacy space because there is so much frustration. And I think we're formally trying to deal with the information and education piece because it allows, it's not, nothing's neutral. But if there's the framing of neutrality that lets us hopefully have more conversations. Does anyone have any more questions? Does anybody want coffee? Well, thank you very much for coming. And please don't hesitate to approach either of us if you didn't want to ask your questions in more. Unrecorded. Yeah, general forum and unrecorded forum and we hope to get the launch information to you as quickly as we possibly can. Thank you. Thank you.