digitizationblog News on digitization in libraries and allied institutions

Announcing Canadian Electronic Reserves: A forum for librarians implementing E-reserves in academic libraries across Canada. The inagural posting states

As a result of copyright law, Canada is far behind American libraries in e-reserves implementation. While there is a plethora of e-reserves research, little is Canadian based.

That's right (yes, here comes a rant) -- laws of the same country that decriminalized possessing marijuana and download music you didn't pay for, and that legalized same-sex marriage, explicitly forbid libraries' digitizing content for the purpose of making it available to students over the web, unless the libraries request and receive permission from each publisher each semester. If a library thinks doing that is time consuming and expensive they should try "Access" Copyright's byzantine reporting procedures, which generate access© a handsome profit (page 10 of their 2004 Annual Report shows that their revenues were $29,649,000 but their expenses, including royalty paybacks to authors, were only $26,865,000). Maybe this isn't so strange -- the Queen still owns the copyright to all federal government documents as well. These views are my own and do not represent those of my employer.

As someone involved in developing the technology and workflow for several e-reserves services at my library (who's views, again, I am not representing), I welcome this new forum, especially during a time when new copyright legislation is pending.