Copyright Buddies: Cultivating Teamwork to Support Our Copyright Journey

Abstract

Our journey to gaining copyright competence started many years ago but from two different points. Susan was teaching an information literacy course and needed to quickly come up to speed to present a unit to her students on copyright and fair use. This led to a book chapter on using fair use cases in the classroom, to taking courses on copyright, attending copyright conferences, and working with New Mexico State University (NMSU) general counsel on an all-campus copyright compliance module. As a newly minted Access Services department head at NMSU Library, Norice traveled down the copyright road from a library services management perspective, developing copyright policies for interlibrary loan, e-reserves, and copy center services. In time, she partnered with the university’s general counsel and others to present copyright sessions across campus. She now regularly teaches copyright to medical students at Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine (Burrell) and has led the development of that college’s copyright policy and guidelines. Our U.S.-Mexico border region is somewhat of a information resource desert, with few academic libraries and librarians nearby to learn from and lean on. We soon became copyright buddies, developing a tag-team approach to helping each other navigate perplexing copyright questions, bouncing ideas and scenarios off one another to support and help each other grow and gain expertise.