Allison Nowicki Estell's CC-BY-NC-ND licensed chapter in the ACRL book Copyright Conversations is available here:  Copyright Self-Study: How to Know What You Know, What You Don’t Know, and How to Discover What You Need to Know Next.

Sara:                    Hello and welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today I am visiting with Allison Estell, the associate director for access and organization from Wentworth Institute of Technology. Allison, welcome to the show.

Allison:               Hi Sara. Thank you so much for having me.

Sara:                    So I wanted to have you on the show because I am so interested in some of your research and I noticed that through your title you don't necessarily have a copyright related title or job description. How did you get interested in copyright?

Allison:               Well, that's true. It's not in my title. It hasn't really been in any of my titles, but it kind of creeps into my job descriptions because I have a law degree. Now that said, I did not actually study any intellectual property or copyright while I was in law school. But I think once I've gotten to my first library job, the credential itself was enough for people to say, "Okay, let's send these questions and projects Allison's way."

Allison:               So, and it's really interesting so that was a good thing then when I was tasked with it, I found it to be also interesting. So yeah, I found myself just thrown into a role that I didn't really have a background in or education in specifically, and I just took what I knew from law school and learning how to learn and I dug in and I did have some resources along the way. In my first library job, I was actually a library student as well in a library assistant role. And so I was able to take a copyright course from, actually not, I graduated from Simmons, but I took a course through our wise consortium was from San Jose State and it gave me some of the basics to get me started. But then a lot of the projects and questions that ensued, I had to kind of supplement on my own.

Sara:                    And you talk about supplementing on your own. And I know in the recent book that was edited by myself, Copyright Conversations, you wrote about kind of self learning copyright. And I found that chapter one of the most, I think useful chapters in the book because so many people are in that boat, right? They're just asked what's the answer to this question? And they have no background. So can you talk a little bit about developing that chapter?

Allison:               Oh absolutely. So as I mentioned, I'd been kind of thrown into doing some copyright here and there and I even had found that people in my other world, I'm also a musician and I would play in some orchestras and people would know, oh, this person is a librarian and also she has a law degree. I bet she can help me find legal information. And so in addition to questions I was getting in the course of my job, people outside of work were also asking me to help them with copyright questions, which again, I always phrase everything with this is not legal advice. I'm just providing legal information.

Allison:               But especially because I don't work in the music library and I'm not really up on either sound recording issues or a lot of the other things that are specific to music, I found myself not having a ton of time but wanting to help and really talking people through, okay, I would have to learn about this myself anyway right now. Let's learn it together or let me point you to the right resources where you can learn about this and where and give you some of the critical thinking and kind of mindset skills that you would need to make a decision. Because ultimately the copyright questions that people bring to us as librarians are ultimately going to be the decision is ultimately our patrons decision to make. We're just giving the information for other people to make their own