Brandon Butler, director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), will be at William & Mary to discuss fair use, copyright and other issues on Friday, April 26.
He will be hosting an informal session for library staff on “ARL Code for Best Practices in Fair Use” from 10 a.m.-noon in Swem Library’s Ford Classroom. The audience will include William & Mary library staff and instructional technologists, as well as guests from the Tidewater Library Consortium. The session will include time for questions and discussion of the best practices document.
Butler will present a campus session that day on “Copyright in the Courts: Recent Cases in Higher Education” from 2-3:30 p.m. in theSadler Center’s Tidewater A Room, with a reception to follow. This session will target instructional faculty, but is open to anyone with a desire to hear more about the recent court rulings and how they impact the broader copyright climate.Butler has been closely following the Georgia State University rulings, and interpreting it in a way that’s easy to understand.
Copyright is a complex issue and Swem Library is committed to helping educate our William & Mary community. Developing a deeper understanding is especially important for our library staff who work directly with students and faculty, and for technical services staff who have a role in the digitization of local collections and content for the College.
During his time with ARL, Butler has worked on a host of issues ranging from fair use to network neutrality to the PATRIOT Act. In the copyright area, he has prepared analysis and commentary on the Google Books Settlement, the Georgia State University e-reserves case, the HathiTrust, orphan works and a wide range of litigation and legislation. Butler is a co-facilitator, with Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide, of the “ARL Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries,” released in January 2012. He also writes the ARL Policy Notes blog and tweets from the @ARLpolicy Twitter account.