Also check out the ALA Policy Corps as well as the ALA Advocacy website
Sara: Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. It's been a hot minute sorry about that everybody but today we have a very special guest. We have Jim, Neil. Hi, Jim!
Jim: Hi! How are you?
Sara: Great! And Jim is the University library in emeritus at Columbia University. He also served as ALA President, and he received 2 awards from the ALA, the highest award on as an honorary member in 2022, as well as the L. Ray Patterson copyright award. Congratulations Jim!
Jim: Thanks, Sara.
Sara: So, Jim, I just wanted to get started. How did you get involved in copyright, as you're not a lawyer by training. But you've been such an advocate in the copyright field and I'm just curious how you got involved in in the beginning.
Jim: Well, it it actually goes way back to the early 1970s. I graduated from Columbia School of Library Service at the end of 1972 and began working as a librarian the following year, and you'll recall this is when a lot of the discussion and debate began to revolve around the updating and modification of the US Copyright Law. And so my early professional career was advanced during this period of time, and I participated in many of the early discussions that led up to the 1976 copyright law.
And so I was born in the context of fair use and the context of the exceptions, the limitations that define the ability of libraries to serve their communities.
I hung out with copyright in a pretty low level way until the late 1980s, and it was at that time when so much of our work had become automated, and we're beginning to see the early publication of the things that we had historically acquired in print were now becoming available electronically, and of course that would explode in the 1990s.
It was also the time that two other things happened. one in the mid-1980s, I'd become very interested in national information policy and my initial plunge into that was in the area of government information: Making sure that the information the Government produced was widely and openly available and accessible.
But, in 1990s I also became Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University, and that was at that time that I recognized how important it was for up or major research libraries, and by extension all academic libraries, to play a significant role as new thinking about copyright began to evolve.
I worked with the Association of College and Research Libraries. I worked with the Board of ARL, of which I was then a member, to really position us as associations that were part of the national debate around copyright.
I also worked with Indiana University to create what I think was the first University library-based copyright advisory office at Indiana University based in Indianapolis and we hired Kenny Crews at that time to run that office. And so I began to meet with groups of librarians around the country, with different boards to develop strategic direction and actions around copyright.
And when I made to move from Indiana to Johns Hopkins where we created a similar copyright office. I got a call from Washington asking me if I would be willing to join the US delegation that was going to go off to Geneva to participate in the World Intellectual Property Organization, a diplomatic conference negotiations on copyright, the basic objective being to update the international copyright law to reflect the digital and network environment in which we were operating.
So I went off for 3 weeks to Geneva, was an advisor to the US delegation.
I tried to get exceptions, limitations, and fair use into the discussion and the debate and that ultimately, of course, led to the adoption of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States.
So that sort of explains the early involvement in participation.
Sara: Sounds like it was
