This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three graphmain forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright and patent—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States. The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open coursebook, which can be freely edited and customized, it is also suitable for an undergraduate class, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class. Each chapter contains cases and secondary readings and a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.

This report looks at how staff at eight academic institutions gained new insight about how students and faculty use their libraries, and how the staff are using these findings to improve library technologies, space, and services. Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in anthropological and ethnographic observation. The report is based on a series of presentations at the second CLIR Seminar on Participatory Design of Academic Libraries, held at the University of Rochester’s River Campus June 5-7, 2013. Chapters focus on projects at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Colby College; University of Connecticut; Columbia University; Rush University Medical Center; Purdue University; Northwestern University; and the University of Rochester. David Lindahl, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, provided the keynote.

As more and more scholars experiment with digital methods and with building digital collections, what measures are in place to make sure that the fruits of these labors are kept vital for the long term? Library directors and chief information officers sense that there is interest on the part of faculty, but does this mean they need to invest in a digital humanities center and hire new staff or just reconfigure the people and resources they already have? First and foremost, what does university leadership seek to gain from such an investment? This study seeks to address the fate of digital research resources - whether they be digital collections of scholarly or other materials, portals, encyclopedias, mapping tools, crowdsourced transcription projects, visualization tools, or other original and innovative projects that may be created by professors, library, or IT staff. Such projects have the potential to provide valuable tools and information to an international audience of learners. Without careful planning and execution, however, they can also all too easily slip between the cracks and quickly become obsolete.

In 2011, a research team led by the University of North Texas, the Educopia Institute/MetaArchive Cooperative, and the worldwide Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), began studying the production, dissemination, and preservation of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The original intent was to develop and disseminate documentation for academic libraries that would help curators better understand and address the preservation challenges presented by these new digital collections. As researchers from the libraries of University of North Texas, Virginia Tech, Rice University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Penn State, and the University of Arizona began to grapple with ETD lifecycle management issues, they quickly realized that librarians were but one of many academic stakeholder groups that work collaboratively to produce and maintain ETD collections. Studying the library role in isolation was neither feasible nor helpful. The scope of our work increased to encompass the roles and responsibilities of core stakeholders in the ETD lifecycle: students, faculty, administrators, technologists, commercial vendors, and librarians. The resulting Guidance Documents address areas of interest to ETD program planners, managers, and curators. They will help this extended set of stakeholders understand, document, and address the administrative, legal, and technical challenges presented by ETDs—from submission …

With the support of the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), Ithaka S+R has developed this guide to support those who are actively managing digital projects and are seeking to develop funding models that will permit them to continue investing in their projects, for the benefit of their users, over time. This report updates Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources (2008) in two major ways: first, by expanding the list of revenue models covered in order to take into account emerging models, including highlighting those methods that are compatible with open access. Second, the report places the notion of ‘revenue generation’ in the context of the fuller range of funding activities we have observed in higher education and the cultural sector. In addition to practices more often seen in the commercial world like advertising and corporate sponsorships, the report devotes time to discussions of a range of philanthropic sources of support as well as support offered by host institutions.