Guest lecturers are a fun alternative to regular lecture!

No offense, dear Professor K, but hey, that was really fun! Many thanks to Ms. C, who came to visit our class. I really enjoyed working on those hypothetical scenarios. Even after several weeks of Electronic Resource Management, plus a course in Information Ethics and Policy, a lot of this stuff is still confusing, or at the very least, not obvious.

How do you really apply fair use standards to e-reserve, and other library, situations? Working with the scenarios really made me realize that there isn't an obvious way to answer that question. I think that for 2 out of the 4 scenarios, I thought, "Well, clearly this is what any library would do." And then Ms. C would say, "This is what we did..." and it was the exact opposite of what I though. I tend to think that I am very pro-fair use and have a "use-it-or-lose-it" mentality. But I found that I tended to give a more-risk averse answer.

I learned that there are "riskier" decisions being made out there than I would have thought. This is apparent from our activity, and also from the Georgia State readings. To which I say, Yay! I think that is a good thing. As representatives of institutions with few resources, we need to take advantage of the few benefits that we have coming our way. (Although, you might ignore the low-resources part altogether and just focus on the fact that we should take advantage of a right built into the law.) That's getting back to that use-it-or-lose it idea. So in the future, I can be reassured that there are institutions pushing back on those who would force an overly broad concept of copyright on everyone else.