(Note: I’m not a copyright expert.  If I’ve made any factual errors here, please feel free to point them out. )

Last month, I spent a lot of time putting together an exhibit on the public domain.   It was a very interesting process for many reasons.

I’d initially planned to organize it based on date. I wanted to show what had fallen into the public domain at different periods of history, in order to make a strong visual point about the end of the twentieth century, which has been characterized by no new materials entering the public domain.  In the end, this was a bit too difficult and precise, so I organized it by medium instead, but as I was doing the research for this exhibit, I found myself thinking about it from a slightly different angle.

Since the 1978 copyright act worked retroactively to extend the length of copyright on everything that wasn’t already in the public domain, nothing has entered the public domain since it passed.  Curiously, we have had another copyright extension between then and now, so we’ve pushed it back even further without allowing enough time for works to expire under the previous law.  There’s plenty of commentary out there about the problems with extending it so far, but the problem that I think hasn’t been sufficiently discussed is the increased difficulty of identifying public domain material under the current term.

This is a serious problem with basing copyright terms on the life of the author rather than the date of publication.  Prior to 1978, works would remain under copyright for a specified amount of time, with one extension allowed.  The 1910 law allowed for a 28 year term with a possible extension for another 28. It’s possible to debate about whether that was long enough, too long, or whatever, but at least it was a known fact that after 56 years, a work would be in the public domain.

The 1978 law changed this certainty by basing copyright on the length of the author’s life.  It said that copyright would last until the author had been dead for 50 years; in the 1990s, this was extended to 70 years.  This means that an additional piece of information is needed to determine the copyright status of a work.  In 1955, it was absolutely certain that every work published in 1899 or earlier was in the public domain.  A person wanting to create interesting derivative works without a license could easily compile a list of works that had been published by that date and choose among them.  After all, publication date is one of a few pieces of basic bibliographic information that is attached to everything that is published and can be easily searched.  Works that had been published from 1927 onward might have been in the public domain, but it depended on whether they’d been renewed, so those works would have had to have been evaluated one by one (and finding out whether a copyright was renewed is not as easy as one might hope).

Right now, our situation is fairly similar, except that the dates in question are much more distant. The magic date is 1923; almost anything published before that is public domain (with some weird exceptions for GATT and music recordings, but let’s not get into that now).  Works published between then and 1950 may be in the public domain if their copyright was not renewed.  However, these works require additional labor to identify and so they get less attention.  In general, 1923 is treated as the magic date because it’s a clear line and it’s relatively easy to work with.  HathiTrust is trying to do some of this important identification work, but it’s a major undertaking to do anything like this on a major scale.

So, the practical public domain tends to end at the end of what can be easily and clearly identified—in this case, at the magic date of 1923.  What does this mean in the future?

In 2019, barring any further copyright extensions, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, giving us a new magic date. (Works that were already under copyright when the 1978 act was passed were granted a 95-year term.)  This will carry us through to 2072, when the new magic date becomes 1977—and that will be the new magic date.  By then, some works will also have entered the public domain under the new rule—that is, all the work of any author who died in 2002 or earlier.  So, a work published in 1979 would still be under copyright if its author had lived beyond that date, but a work published in 2001 by an author who died the following year would be copyright-free.  This is odd, but what is more troubling to me is that the latter work would be unlikely to be treated as a public domain work.  What’s more likely is that those looking for works in the public domain will focus their efforts on looking through works from the middle of the twentieth century. Works between 1977 and 70 years before the current year will fall into a zone of uncertainty where additional effort is needed to figure out what can and can’t be done.  In my example this gap is only thirty years, it’s not a huge problem, but after this point, the magic date will no longer advance, so the gap will only grow.

Now, finding out who the author of a work is and when that person died isn’t a very difficult problem for an individual work.  It’s certainly much easier than trying to figure out whether a copyright was renewed.  My concern here has more to do with identifying many items at once.  Suppose, for instance, that one wanted to engage in large scale digitization projects. With a date-based system, it is very simple to search for a particular date. On the other hand, the date of an author’s death is not immediately considered basic bibliographic information, and it’s quite difficult to get it included, since when a work is published, we do not usually know when the author will die—so the only way to do this is to find out, every time anybody dies, whether he or she had written, painted or recorded anything and then add that information to every record that exists.  I’m not sure who is supposed to be responsible for keeping track of that.  Even on a smaller scale, it’s not going to be easy to identify items that aren’t already known to be public domain, especially if they are not famous already.

Yes, this is a long term concern, it’s too late to worry about it anyway, and it’s not nearly as pernicious as some other disturbing things that have been happening in the realm of copyright lately, but I do think it’s something that wasn’t adequately considered when these laws were passed.



In another lifetime, I was a writing teacher.  I taught first-year composition, and, before that, I worked in a writing center. In fact, a writing center is where I really started to learn about teaching.  This means that I still think of learning through a writing-centric lens at many times, and that I have high expectations of writing centers and very specific ideas about what I think they do there that may not actually apply to any particular writing center.

So, when I am working on the reference desk, I often end up doing things that could very easily be described as writing instruction. I don’t usually look at drafts, but I help students interpret assignments. I work with them on their topics to help them figure out what is feasible and to determine the appropriate breadth of a paper topic.  I talk with them about how sources can be used.  Sometimes we talk about scholarly discourse, though I don’t use these words explicitly. Some of this probably comes from the background I’ve described, and some of it is just the nature of the reference desk. Students who come to the reference desk are often writing papers, and their struggles are sometimes related to sources and sometimes stem from an unclear idea of exactly what is expected of them or exactly what they want to do.

When I worked in a writing center, we were committed to working with students at all stages of the writing process. We often talked about research—it’s part of writing, after all—and we were very conscious of figuring out where students were in the process.  We were pretty explicit when talking with them about this process and what we thought the next steps were, and we were realistic about not being able to take the paper all the way to where it needed to be in a single session. It was important to give some thought to exactly what could be done at that particular moment and to be aware that there are other stages and other relationships involved in students’ writing.

I think this is a good model.  I think librarians do a lot of these things instinctively; at least, I hope we do, because we don’t spend a lot of time talking about it.  We talk about the reference interview and finding out what a student’s needs are, but not about identifying what stage the student is stuck at, and certainly not to make these connections to writing.  The ACRL information literacy standards appear to describe a (simplified, idealized) linear research process, and we don’t always complicate it by talking about how messy research can be in real life—and if research is complicated, teaching research certainly isn’t simple! But our models tend to simplify.  I have often encountered an assumption that we intervene at a very particular part of the writing/research process and that the help we provide to students is very specific—that we help them to identify useful resources and demonstrate how they may do so for themselves.  In reality, though, sometimes helping the students to understand what they need involves delving into this writing process.

But it can be overwhelming to encounter a student who needs serious writing help at the reference desk.  Such students may well see my writing advice as peripheral to their question, since after all, they don’t expect writing help from a librarian.

I talked with some librarians at ACRL who were presenting posters on writing center/library collaborations; it seemed at the time like such an obvious, brilliant thing to do, and it still seems that way. I wonder if there are other ways to build up relationships with the writing folks on my campus.

I know, I know. Blogging is supposed to be timely, and it’s already been a long time since ACRL.  But I wanted to write about the Jaron Lanier keynote, and despite delays, I will.

This April, I attended ACRL for the second time. I like conferences in general, and I’m fond of ACRL in particular. I enjoy learning about all the fascinating things that people do at other libraries, getting ideas, and becoming reinvigorated by contact with librarians outside my home institution. It’s one of my favorite parts of being a librarian.  There, I attended the Saturday morning keynote by Jaron Lanier.  I haven’t read his book (should I?), but I was still eager to hear what he would say.

There were several strains to his speech, but the one that’s been bothering me, the one I needed to start a blog to address, was about the role of libraries in the age of informational ubiquity.  His argument was that libraries “romanticize the book” and that librarians need to make books special.  The idea is that technology is decreasing our appreciation of a book, both by enabling easier access and by allowing books to be compiled and combined into one database where, for instance, you can have NGrams. Or where you can pull chapters out of several books and put them in any order that you want.  A book as a thing loses its shape under such circumstances. We need, according to Lanier, “ritual inconvenience” to impress us with the importance of things that matter, and books are included among them.

That’s an interesting argument, but it worries me.  I’m an academic librarian who works in a highly diverse institution, and I wonder what this sort of attitude toward books does to my students.

Through pure serendipity, I happened at the same time to be reading Hunger of Memory.  I hadn’t read it before (I know, I know, I should be ashamed) and I found myself deeply frustrated by many of the arguments that Rodriguez makes, almost all of which I won’t address here. What interests me is the degree to which he romanticized books and how detrimental that could have been to his education.

If you, my hypothetical reader, have not read Hunger of Memory, you should know that it’s an autobiographical work about how the author, a man from a Spanish-speaking family who was the first in his family to be educated, interacted with academic institutions throughout his life, ultimately earning a PhD in English literature.  He writes about his early childhood experiences with books, which included remedial reading instruction from a nun:

One day the nun concluded a session by asking me why I was so reluctant to read by myself.  I tried to explain; said something about the way written words made me feel all alone – almost, I wanted to add but didn’t, as when I spoke to myself in a room just emptied of furniture. She studied my face as I spoke; she seemed to be watching more than listening. In an uneventful voice she replied that I had nothing to fear. Didn’t I realize that reading would open up whole new worlds? … I listened with respect. But her words were not very influential. I was thinking then of another consequence of literacy, one I was too shy to admit but nevertheless trusted.  Books were going to make me ‘educated.’

I put these together and I worry. Rodriguez describes himself as a both a good student and a bad student because, while he worked very hard and read many books, he read them believing that they had some magic power to change him and not as a conversation in which he could engage, or in which he had any right to engage. He read to extract some “core essence” from each book, because “if this essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learned like my teachers.” He was “not a good reader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read in order to acquire a point of view.” Critical thinking was not part of his relationship with books until much later in his education.

I quote this passage because it’s such a good description of how a romanticized book might look to students, particularly students for whom a book is not a commonplace object. Now, Rodriguez is a success story. The very fact that he was able to write this about himself proves that he moved through this stage and past it.  I’m quite sure that some of my students are like him: attracted to books precisely because they see them as part of some different, special world, one that is not readily accessible to them.  This isn’t great if we want them to become critical thinkers or if we want them to learn stuff, but at least these students are reading.

But we have lots of students.  Think of the flip side of this: the student who is intimidated by books, who feels out of place and reluctant to participate as a result.  For this student, romanticizing books puts them out of reach. Imagine, too, the student who believes that things that are romanticized are only beautiful or special and never useful, and who therefore does not turn to books for their utility.

I’m an academic librarian. I want my students to use books (and other kinds of information resources) to think critically. I want them to understand that books are part of a scholarly conversation in which arguments are hammered out and refined—that all these books are talking to each other. I want them to know that different kinds of texts are produced and used under different circumstances and what those circumstances are.  And I want them to take in ideas from what they read, compare them, weigh them, and eventually come to their own, better informed, conclusions.

What I don’t want is for them to be lost in awe.