What changes have academic libraries made in response to the ARL's 'Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries'?

Question

ARL recently published the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries" which they describe as:

a clear and easy-to-use statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use developed by and for librarians who support academic inquiry and higher education.

I am curious to know if any university libraries have changed their policies, or are in the process of changing their policies for preserving and providing access to collections based on the fair use arguments in the best practices code.

Answer 1

I think you may be... somewhat overestimating the typical rate of change in academic libraries. ;) I suspect that somewhat under 50% of academic-library administrators in libraries with digitization programs (itself a percentage far less than 100% of academic libraries) are even aware of the Code at this point.

My sense is that the Code will not materially impact digitization programs' decisionmaking processes. There's always more to digitize than any library can slog through; there's always more already in the public domain than any library can slog through. Given that, why risk it, Code or no Code?

Digitization programs that already rely on fair use -- and quite a few do -- may feel better about their decisions post-Code, but again, the Code's impact will not be great.

I could be wrong about this. What I am quite sure of is that measuring the Code's impact is premature, and will always be difficult -- perhaps in 5-10 years we can take a snapshot of digitized materials and estimate percentages still under copyright, yet available?

Answer 2

We had it on our list of summer "to do" projects, but will need to review it in light of the recent decision in the Georgia case. The work on ARL publication was all done before the decision came down.

Answer 3

We've turned one of the principles into a fillable form that's a replacement for the standard "fair use checklist" for situations where it applies. It's not cleared by campus counsel yet, but basically it has a short introduction, gives the URL to the Code, and then has boxes where staff can check they're complying with all the Limitations, and indicate which optional Enhancements apply.

Folks in Special Collections prefer it head and shoulders over the standard Columbia et al checklist because it's much shorter, skips the things that are the same all the time, and gets right to the relevant issues. Next I want to do one for the third principle, about digitizing to preserve at-risk items.