ABSTRACT Librarians are often regarded, either formally or informally, as the experts on copyright at their institutions. This role can assume added importance in the distance learning environment, where so much copyrighted material is made available in online courses. Hazel Davis is a faculty librarian and the Library Director at Rio Salado College, a non-traditional community college, which has a current enrollment of 25,000 online students. Part of her responsibilities have included the establishment and supervision of a distance learning copyright permissions department at the college, whereby a systematic and structured copyright procurement process is in place. Course developers submit information about the third party materials they would like to make available to students in their online courses (including such items as book excerpts, journal articles, images and film clips) and these items are then researched and evaluated by Hazel and her staff to gauge whether permission is required to include them in online courses. Considerations include whether the items are in the public domain, covered by the fair use statutes, or are library subscriptions which can be linked within the course via PURL script technology, etc. Once the evaluation has been made, permission is secured by library copyright staff, where necessary, via an established permissions process, and the items are mounted in the course. The college has a centralized course development department, and Hazel is a member of this team, meeting with the course developers and instructional designers in the early stages of course development. She makes the maware of the many resources available through the college online library for use in their courses, and also assists with researching possible resources that might be appropriate, based on their needs for course content to meet course competencies. Hazel has also presented several workshops on copyright best practices for faculty members at all 10 institutionsin her community college district who are teaching in the online or hybrid environment. The workshop at OCLS will include the following elements: • an overview of copyright law as it pertains to the online environment • a description of the systematic copyright process at the presenter'sinstitution • types of third party materials that can be used in online courses • avenues for use of third party materials, including the public do-main, fair use, the TEACH Act, library subscription databases (including persistent links), free Web links, and requesting permission from the copyright holder • the permissions process