Benson:  Today’s episode of Copyright Chat features Lisa Hinchliffe, colleague of mine at the University of Illinois Library, coordinator of Information Literacy Service and Instruction, full professor, and chair of the IFLA Information Literacy Section. Thank you for being here, Lisa.

Hinchliffe: Thank you for having me.

Benson: So you recently co-organized an offsite meeting at IFLA 2017, titled “Models for Copyright Education and Information Literacy Programs.” Can you tell me a little bit about why you organized that program?

Hinchliffe: Sure. It was a really very successful program. I’m really proud of it I co-organized this with my colleagues Janice Pilch, who’s a faculty member at Rutgers library, and Tom Lipinski, who is the Dean of the iSchool at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Collectively, we have an interest in making sure that everyone who’s using information understands the way that copyright impacts the work that they do, but then, a special angle of this particular program was to look at the ways that libraries educate users around copyright, through primarily, of course, our information literacy programs. So we are able to look at the question of, you know, how do we make sure through staff training and development that library workers are aware of copyright, fair-use related issues, but then also how are we passing those along to the people that we are responsible for educating, often undergraduate students, but also graduate students, post-docs, faculty, staff–there’s so many people who are seeking that kind of guidance on information literacy­­. They’re seeking that kind of guidance on copyright, and that we are able to serve them through our information literacy programs.

Benson: So when you originally proposed this conference, offsite session of IFLA, was this a natural connection between copyright and information literacy that others saw, or was this something that you had to kind of make apparent to others in terms of the connection that you saw between the two?

Hinchliffe: Sure, actually, we were quite pleased to see that it was not difficult to explain the importance of bringing these two issues together at all. The way IFLA works is a group will make a proposal that they want to hold such an offsite meeting, and as that proposal is reviewed, the review committee will often encourage them to participate and engage other groups in IFLA, and so the copyright and other legal matters committee of IFLA had wanted to do something around copyright education, and as that proposal was reviewed, they were encouraged to talk to the information literacy section. And it was no question at all within the information literacy section that we wanted to engage in this, because we know that libraries and librarians are engaging in the issues of copyright education as part of their information literacy programs, whether it’s the most sort of, if you will, sort of the routine of the importance of siting your sources, up to, of course, our more robust scholarly communications information literacy