Conference impressions

I was lucky enough to attend two conferences this week.

The first conference was held at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and dealt with digital library projects -- more specifically with ContentDM. The presentations I found the most helpful were those that demonstrated specific projects and solutions to problems. It’s helpful for me to see the thought processes of others dealing with similar projects and problems. And since so many of us are using the same software it’s helpful to see the capabilities others have found.

The second conference was the Midwest chapter meeting of the Visual Resources Association, held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and at Indiana University. There were two presentations, both of which were extremely helpful.
Kenneth Crews presented “Copyright and education: trends, developments, and future directions.” After hearing his name several times over the past few years, it was nice to see him in person. I learned that the case of Bridgeman vs. Corel determined that there is no copyright protection on reproductions of two dimensional public domain works. This is why visual resource librarians can digitize their slides of public domain works. But it also means that the libraries don’t own copyright on our digital reproductions of those photographs. Photographs that include a public domain work and additional elements chosen by the photography are copyright protected. Also, photographs of three dimensional works have copyright protection. He also spoke about Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (search engines can provide thumbnails of copyrighted works), and cases involving Texaco and Kinkos. Finally, he provided us with his Checklist for Fair Use.
Eileen Fry at Indiana University presented a workshop on the CCO metadata scheme. It’s too bad that we can't input XML metadata into ContentDM. It was good to see how the VRA pros handle certain metadata challenges, and maybe I can incorporate certain elements of this into our metadata definitions and fields.