the 5th annual
CAA/NINCH
Copyright Town Meeting, 2001

Licensing Initiatives for Scholars and Teachers:
Contributions from the Copyright Industry and Other Resources

Theme | Date | Sessions
Additional Information | Submit Query | Participants
Biographies | Statements | Resources

Session Theme: top

This fifth edition of the annual NINCH/CAA Copyright Town Meeting is devoted to intellectual property that has been specifically prepared to be licensed for educational and scholarly use. It concerns the distribution of copyrighted and other materials especially crafted to meet the current and emerging needs of university artists and of art historians, among others. The presenters will be given opportunity to paint their own images of how their products can alter, improve, or re-create the methods of education and research.

The participants have been drawn from the variety of for-profit and not-for-profit licensors who serve the art-historical, educational and intellectual communities. The speakers have been asked to discuss how their services and products specifically help fulfill educational and scholarly missions in ways that unlicensed collections typically do not or can not. The selection process did not distinguish between for-profit enterprises or not-for-profit projects. The only criteria were these: Do they offer products for research and education. Do they approach old problems in new ways. Have they invented something entirely new. Some of the speakers represent organizations highly invested in new technologies, while others are still working in traditional ways.

Represented in this session is a traditional art-history slide resource (SASKIA) who is working to transform its catalogue and methods from analog distribution to digital and, in the process, inventing new formats and licensing products. AMICO who offers institutional subscriptions to the AMICO library of art images, including museum content, QUESTIA, an innovative effort to provide indexed digital access to tens of thousands of published works used in undergraduate humanities education. Not presenting, but sitting on the Q&A panel during the second half of the program will be a representative from the Academic Image Cooperative (AIC), a unique program engaged in collecting public domain and otherwise unencumbered images for use by art historians, among others. In addition, the executive director of the Visual Artists Gallery Association (VAGA) will discuss his organization's role as licensing agency for artists and the means by which VAGA serves scholarly and educational interests alongside commercial ones. Finally, Tom Bower, a member of the intellectual property group of the National Museum of American History and the Intellectual Property Committee of the College Art Association, will dissect the process by which educators and scholars request permission to publish images, better to increase their chances of obtaining favorable treatment and the benefits traditionally extended to scholars.

Date and Location: top

Saturday, March 3, 2001
Chicago meeting of the College Art Association
Chicago Hilton and Towers

Sessions: top

One:		9:30 - 12:00		Presentations
Two:		12:30 - 2:00		Q&A Panel for follow-up Discussion

Additional Information: top

NINCH Town Meetings are open to the public. CAA does not accept reservations for any sessions. In order to attend the 9:30 to 12:00 session, individuals will either need to show a conference badge or purchase a single session ticket at the conference ($35 or $25 for students, cash only) -- single session tickets will not be available before the conference. Tickets are not required for entry to the 12:30 to 2:00 session. For more information on the conference and the Town Meeting Schedule consult http://www.collegeart.org

Contact Robert Baron for additional information concerning session content: ()

SUBMIT A QUESTION IN ADVANCE
Individuals who cannot attend this program (and those who do plan to attend) are invited to present questions in advance to be asked in their behalf. The session chairs will choose from among the questions tendered those they consider most pertinent. Use the following hyperlink to submit your query. SUBMIT QUERY BY PROXY Responses will be available in the audio-taped proceedings. Selections will likely appear in the NINCH report on this meeting.

Participants: top

Co-chairs: David Green (NINCH) and Robert Baron () (CAA Committee on Intellectual Property)

Renate Wiedenhoeft, SASKIA Cultural Documentation, Ltd. (http://www.saskia.com)

Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) (http://www.amico.org)

Carol Hughes, Director of Collections Management, Questia Media, Inc. (http://www.questia.com)

Robert Panzer, Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) (rpanzer@vagarights.com)

Thomas W. Bower, Deputy Registrar, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. (http://americanhistory.si.edu)

Max Marmor, Director, Yale Art Library, for The Academic Image Cooperative (AIC), (http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/aic.htm)

N.B. Presenters Thomas Bower and Robert Panzer are current members of the College Art Association Committee on Intellectual Property (CIP). Robert Baron is the outgoing chair of CIP. Max Marmor will join the presenters in the Panel Discussion during the second session.

Theme | Date | Sessions
Additional Information | Participants | Biographies
Statements | Resources

Biographies of Participants: top

Thomas W. Bower is Deputy Registrar at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Among other duties, he has responsibility for oversight of the museum's copyright issues and has been Co-Chair of the SI Rights and Reproductions Committee since 1992. During that time he has overseen the creation of image use guidelines for the institution. He has been a member of CAA's Committee on Intellectual Property since 1995.

Carol Ann Hughes has worked as an academic librarian in a variety of settings for over 25 years. She is currently employed by Questia Media, Inc., a commercial research service designed to support students in undergraduate core courses. She came to Questia Media from the University of Iowa where she served as Head of Information, Research, and Instructional Services. Other former positions include that of program officer for RLG's interlibrary loan program, SHARES and the University of Michigan where she was assistant to the Director. She received her MLS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an MBA from UCLA, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan School of Information.

Max Marmor is head of the Arts Library at Yale. During 2000-2001 he is serving as a Distinguished Fellow of the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation. In that capacity, he is working closely with the DLF and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a suite of digital image collections on the model of the DLF's Academic Image Cooperative, collections that respond powerfully to widespread needs on the part of teachers, students, and scholars in the field of art history.

Robert Panzer is the Executive Director of VAGA, the Visual Artists and Galleries Association, Inc., an artists membership organization and copyright collective. Formed over twenty years ago, VAGA was the first copyright clearinghouse in the country to represent reproduction and related rights for fine artists. VAGA represents over 500 American artists and estates, and through agreements with sister organizations worldwide, approximately 2000 foreign creators. In addition to VAGA's role in administering licenses on behalf of its members, VAGA polices for infringements in areas of copyright, trademark and moral rights. Robert Panzer is a member of the CAA Committee on Intellectual Property.

Jennifer Trant is a the Executive Director of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) an innovative not-for-profit collaboration that shares, shapes and standardizes museum digital documentation and makes it available for educational use.

Trant serves on the Board of the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums (AAM), is past chair of the Multimedia Working Group of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) Committee on Documentation (CIDOC), is co-chair of the Museums and the Web Conference and the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM), and was on the program committee of the ACM Digital Libraries conference in 1999 and 2000.

She was the first Director of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL), an innovative project to explore the use of digital museum documentation on university campuses, participated in the Visual Images Working Group of Conference on Fair Use (CONFU). Trant was Editor-in-Chief of Archives and Museum Informatics: the cultural heritage informatics quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal from Kluwer Academic Publishers, from 1997-2000.

Trained as an Historian (BA Hons, Trinity College, Toronto) and Art Historian (MA, Queen's University, Kingston) Trant's career has included work with the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Getty Art History Information Program, The Art Information Task Force (a joint project of the College Art Association and the Getty Project that produced the Categories for the Description of Works of Art), the Arts and Humanities Data Service, King's College, London, England and Archives & Museum Informatics, a cultural heritage informatics consulting firm. Her current interests center around the use of technology to improve access to cultural heritage information, and to integrate the culture fully into digital libraries for research, learning and enjoyment.

Renate Wiedenhoeft is President and co-founder of Saskia Ltd. Cultural Documentation. Saskia was established in 1966, amidst the dynamic forces of art history at Columbia University in the sixties, to provide high quality images for serious art history research and education. Quickly acquiring the support of the ten largest research institutions in the country, and with the partnership of Fulbright scholar Ron Wiedenhoeft, Renate grew the company into the important archive that it is today. She has been active in numerous organizations over the past 35 years -- such as CAA since 1966 and VRA since its inception. Other related organizations include ARLIS/NA, US/ICOMOS/ National Trust Organization. Renate has overseen many transitions in the materials Saskia provides for scholarly study -- not only in the kinds of materials offered but also in the difficulties of acquiring those materials. From having to help free her husband from nine months of imprisonment in East Berlin for photographing architecture, to negotiating rights with museums around the world, Renate's breadth of experience offers a broad perspective on the many issues involved in providing educational materials in an ever-changing environment.

Theme | Date | Sessions
Additional Information | Participants | Biographies
Statements | Resources

Statements by Participants: top

Baron | Bower | Hughes | Marmor | Panzer | Trant | Wiedenhoeft

Town Meeting Chair | AIC | AMICO
CAA Copyright Committee Permissions Project
QUESTIA | SASKIA | VAGA

 

Robert A. Baron, --go to section head--

co-chair 2001 NINCH/CAA Copyright Town Meeting.

This fifth annual NINCH/CAA Copyright Town Meeting is devoted to academic licensing, that is, to intellectual property that has been specifically prepared to be licensed for educational and scholarly use. It concerns the distribution of copyrighted and other materials especially crafted to meet the current and emerging needs of university artists and of art historians, among others.

Previous CAA Copyright Town Meetings were dedicated to other issues -- to the activities of the Committee on Fair Use (CONFU) and its aftermath, to the educational exercise of the right of Fair Use and to the rights of faculty to use the materials they develop in and out of the classroom.

More often than not, in the past, in these sessions licensed resources were tarred as the nemesis of traditional scholarly enterprise. But this year with adjusted focus we will look at the benefits and achievements of licensing from the licensor's point of view. In this forum licensors are being asked to show the scholarly community how educational licensing and licensed products (be these images or information) can offer benefits that traditional methods of information acquisition cannot easily or successfully develop. In the Q&A session that follows the presentations we expect that the audience will provide additional perspectives on these issues.

The inspiration for this session derives from the realization that in the near future distribution of digital information, as controlled under the DMCA and under database legislation, will severely limit the right of educators to acquire resources under the customary presumption of academic warrant (or Fair Use), and that new acquisitions, more likely than not, will become subject to the rules and conditions of contracts and licensing agreements. We want to know whether these resources will replicate what was available in the world of analog information, or will they bring something altogether new to the educational arena.

Our theme of the hour may be said to have been spun from two threads pulled from the fabric of earlier Town Meetings. For instance, in the 1997 NINCH Copyright Town Meeting held at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Chrysanne Lowe, representing the Academic Press, spoke of the challenges of managing and delivering electronic resources and of the consequential benefits such management services bestowed on libraries. One motif in her talk however raised the issue of how to make licensing inclusive -- how to make licensed products available to individuals and institutions who might normally be excluded from proprietary site-licensed resources.

It was clear that electronic access to vast scholarly resources, through licensing, helps solve problems encountered by libraries and repositories, but it was not clear how independent and other undefined classes of users could be included. There was (and still is) justifiable fear that licensed resources will create classes of "haves" and "have-nots," and that access to knowledge will be limited to those with university affiliations. We pride ourselves in the belief that access to knowledge should be free to all. We must continue to ask how licensing will fulfill this national mission, this credo. Other issues at play concern the continuity of access to resources once a license has lapsed. How, for instance, will unlicensed readers of published materials be able to inspect on-line documentation and related references when they are available only to those who have suitable license privileges. Licensors are becoming increasingly aware of these issues and are beginning to develop formulae aimed at overcoming these and similar problems.

The session planned for the CAA, hopefully, will not be used as an opportunity to find and amplify the fault-lines in this process. Rather, it is the intention of the program chairs that this time be dedicated to allowing the presenters opportunity to paint their own images of how their products can alter, improve, or re-create the methods of education and research.

In the second thread from a past conference, the site-licensing of image resources was given a compelling rationale (1998 Toronto CAA Town Meeting) when Max Anderson, speaking on behalf of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), outlined how the AMICO licensing paradigm was intended to foster the creation a cross-institutional database of art images and associated information. This information base, informed by live information flowing from museums -- and not just the usual label copy -- he said is expected to include the kind of unpublished materials that normally lies deeply hidden in aging curatorial files. The purpose of this approach, he suggested, is to break the long-standing hegemony enjoyed by museums on data about their objects -- its purpose is to share this data, and for everyone to benefit thereby from the consequentially expanded interest in museums and their objects -- even (or perhaps especially) when that interest manifests as newfound controversy. In his brief talk Anderson (now the director of the Whitney Museum of Art) placed the Art Museum Image Consortium in position to meet pressing needs of teachers and academics for high quality images, and to fulfill the desire for accurate and previously unavailable information. To this listener, most importantly, in this presentation, he suggested that licensing and the income licensing provides can serve as the key that opens the door to the creation of a service that integrates the information resources of organizations comfortably accustomed to using inaccessible, individualistic or idiosyncratic recording strategies.

In his talk Anderson also reconstructed the meaning of licensing fees. The costs of licensing in his vision, no longer are to be viewed as payment for a service and for use of a sustainable resource; rather, the payment of fees is to be understood as a contribution to building a cooperative venture. Their function is to help reach an enviable but yet elusive goal. In this light, in an important way, the consortium represented by AMICO in museum director Anderson's construct is to be understood not nominally as a gathering of museums, or a museum self-interest group, as it were, but more accurately as a service aimed at unifying image owners and image users -- now drawn together (once again) for similar and complimentary purposes.

It is in this light that the participants scheduled for the 2001 CAA Copyright Town Meeting have been selected. They have been drawn from the variety of for-profit and not-for-profit licensors who serve the art-historical, educational and intellectual communities. The speakers have been asked to discuss how their services and products specifically help fulfill educational and scholarly missions in ways that unlicensed collections typically do not or can not. The selection process did not distinguish between for-profit enterprises or not-for-profit programs. The only criteria was these: do they offer products for research and education; do they approach old problems in new ways; have they invented something entirely new.

ACADEMIC IMAGE COOPERATIVE --go to section head--

Max Marmor, Director, Yale Art Library

Two years ago, the Digital Library Federation, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the co-sponsorship of the CAA, initiated a planning process to develop a scaleable database of curriculum-based digital images to be used for teaching survey courses in the history of art. This planning process resulted in a prototype database and image collection. It also developed technical, organizational, and policy frameworks that have the potential for sustaining a more ambitious online service, one capable of identifying, developing, and disseminating a far larger number of curriculum-based and scholarly image collections.

Since the completion of this planning process in August 2000, ongoing discussions between the DLF and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have focused on how the AIC's image collection -- and the learning derived from its development -- might contribute to a broader initiative under development by the Foundation and provisionally named ArtSTOR. The result is a collaboration whereby the DLF is helping to identify and develop circumscribed, strategically identified image collections that respond to widespread teaching and other specialist scholarly needs. It is envisaged that these collections, including the one developed by the AIC, will be incorporated into the evolving ArtSTOR service, which eventually will be managed as a project of the Foundation or an organization it may designate.

AMICO --go to section head--

Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, Art Museum Image Consortium

Four years ago a group of representatives of museums from the US and Canada joined together to explore ways to enable access to their collections through digital technologies. Building on the work of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, a six month planning process shaped the Art Museum Image Consortium, an innovative not-for-profit collaboration that enables educational use of museum multimedia.

Together, members have created The AMICO Library, made available for institutional licensing in July of 1999. To date, over 800,000 students in the US and Canada can count The AMICO Library among one of their institutional digital resources. With an agreement with the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils) adds an additional 1.2 million users to this group.

AMICO is succeeding in offering unprecedented access to the multimedia documentation of members' collections. We are forging a new model of how museums can work together to provide high-quality images, detailed textual documentation and associated multimedia for educational users. Working together, we have been able to come to a joint agreement with the Artists Rights Society to enable inclusion of works under copyright, and with Antenna Audio to enable the incorporation of sound files. Members regularly add new works to the AMICO Library, and enhance their records with descriptive notes, links to associated documents, and additional details as available. AMICO also enhances the Library, improving access through indexes and editorial guidelines.

Working together, we have been able to reduce the costs of licensing materials to educational users. Common agreements offer the same terms to all subscribers with the benefits of efficiencies of administration, and economies of scale are emerging within our not-for-profit structure.

In this presentation, I'll examine AMICO's experience and identify the ways that we hope to contribute to developing high quality networked digital resources for use in education. That these new collections may not look exactly like the slide library of the past is to us a benefit of new opportunities, new organizations, and new methods.

CAA Copyright Committee --go to section head--

A User Friendly Image Publication Use Request Form
Thomas W. Bower, Deputy Registrar, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Scholars and teachers frequently complain that museums, archives and other image repositories charge fees to reproduce images that accompany their published papers.. Many scholars do not generally know that these fees might be waived if licensing institutions were appropriately informed about the destination, nature and extent of the intended use.

To help remedy this problem, on behalf of the CAA's Committee on Intellectual Property, I have helped prepare a scholar's guide to licensing requests. This short document helps authors supply the crucial information image holders need to evaluate a scholar's request, and helps them determine whether to charge or waive its image use fee. Scholars and other not-for-profit image users are invited to use or adapt this guide when requesting permission to reproduce images. We call this guide "A User Friendly Image Publication Use Request Form." Specifically, the guide helps scholars ask for a waiver of fees based on the intended "fair use" of the materials.

Currently, this document is being reviewed by CAA for inclusion in a CAA on-line resource devoted to Reproduction Rights in Scholarly and Educational Publishing. Its current version (as a work-in-progress) may be accessed from the "resources" section of this page. Chicago CAA Town Meeting attendees will be invited to offer their suggestions and comments. Readers may write directly to Tom Bower at MRC 640, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. or e-mail: bowert@mnah.si.edu.

QUESTIA --go to section head--

Carol Hughes, Director of Collections Management, Questia Media, Inc.

Questia is a unique, online research service for students in undergraduate core courses. The company’s holistic environment helps students perform more thorough academic research and write better papers. The service consists of a collection of full-text books and journal articles, with an emphasis in the humanities and social sciences, combined with powerful research tools. The presentation will provide a summary of Questia’s background and what the service has to offer students. The collection management process, including the rights process, will specifically be explored, from the initial selection of titles to the technical integration of text into the service. The presentation will also review specific service components with a particular emphasis on research tools made available to users on the site. In closing, Questia will welcome a lively discussion with audience members concerning the service’s impact on teaching, learning, and libraries. (http://www.questia.com)

SASKIA --go to section head--

Licensing Art Images for the Educational Community
Renate Wiedenhoeft, President, SASKIA Ltd. Cultural Documentation

This presentation will examine and address the many paradoxes of licensing images to the academic community restricting use in an unrestricted environment of ideas and free-flow of information, offering highest possible quality of images for teaching while still preserving the rights of museums, charging fees for images versus free images on the Internet. How much has really changed in offering and teaching with digital images, or have we encountered the same (or similar) issues before in teaching with slides? (http://www.saskia.com)

VAGA --go to section head--

Robert Panzer's presentation will consist of an overview of VAGA with particular attention paid to the concerns of teachers and scholars.

Topics will include the reasons for VAGA's founding; who we serve; why we charge; our pricing system structure; how we treat scholars versus other publishers and art users; who has what rights; what is important to our member artists; our relationship to museums, galleries, and stock houses, especially as regards to rights questions and fees; how best to work with VAGA to insure fair fees; and how our sister societies overseas fit into the picture.

Theme | Date | Sessions
Additional Information | Participants | Biographies
Statements | Resources

Resources: top

Submitted by Robert Baron:

NINCH site: http://www.ninch.org

Information on past NINCH Town Meetings:
http://www.ninch.org
http://www.studiolo.org/index01.htm
http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/cweb.htm#MEETINGS

QUESTIA site: http://www.questia.com

Introduction to QUESTIA mission.

QUESTIA Press Releases and articles in newspapers and the media.

Tom Bower's "User Friendly Image Publication Use Request Form" A working draft. 2/2002 version

Official page for The Academic Image Cooperative (AIC)
http://www.clir.org/diglib/collections/aic.htm

Additional materials on Academic Image Cooperative

AMICO site: http://www.amico.org

Max Anderson's AMICO Presentation at 1988 Toronto Town Meeting

Howard Besser's Anti Site-licensing presentation from 1988 Toronto Town Meeting.

SASKIA site: http://www.saskia.com

Christine Sundt's Art Copyright site: http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/cweb.htm

Robert Baron's Copyright Pages: http://www.studiolo.org/index01.htm

 

Submitted by Robert Panzer:

Georgia Harper's University of Texas "Crash Course on Copyright":
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindx.htm

United States Copyright Office:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/

Intellectual Property Law Resources on Web:
http://www.intelproplaw.com/Copyright/index.shtml

American Association of Museums, Comments on Fair use by Christine Steiner (Getty Trust), Steve Weil (Smithsonian) and Michael S. Shapiro:
http://www.aam-us.org/des.htm (Originally published in Museum, an AAM journal.)

Christine L. Sundt's (University of Oregon) site on Copyright and Art Issues:
http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/cweb.htm#Useful

Recommended books"

Getting Permission How to License & Clear Copyrighted Materials Online and Off, by Richard Stim, Nolo Press, Berkely, CA ( http://www.nolo.com )

The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook, by Lloyd Jassin and Steven Schechter, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY

Submitted by Jennifer Trant:

Recent publications include the following:

David Bearman, Eric Miller, Godfrey Rust, Jennifer Trant and Stuart Weibel, "A Common Model to Support Interoperable Metadata, Progress report on reconciling metadata requirements from the Dublin Core and INDECS/DOI Communities," D-Lib Magazine, Volume 5 Number 1, January 1999. Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html

David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, "Economic, Social, Technical Models for Digital Libraries of Primary Resources," invited contribution, New Review of Information Networking, #4, 1998, pp 71-91. Paper available at http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/amico/.

David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, "Authenticity of Digital Resources: Towards a Statement of Requirements in the Research Process," D-Lib Magazine June 1998. Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/06bearman.html

Also of interest to the CAA IP group are the following:

"Museums and Intellectual Property: Rethinking Rights Management for a Digital World," with David Bearman, Visual Resources, Special Issue, Copyright and Fair Use, The Great Image Debate, Robert A. Baron, ed., Vol. XII, no. 3-4, 1997, 269-280.

"New Models for Distributing Digital Content: The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project," Digital Imaging Access and Retrieval, ed. by. P. Bryan Heidorn and Beth Sandore, the 33rd Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 1996, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997, 29-41. Paper available at http://www.archimuse.com/papers/jt.illinois.html

Theme | Date | Sessions
Additional Information | Participants | Biographies
Statements | Resources

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