With the exception of some very old texts, virtually any intellectual material you wish to put on Blackboard for your students will be copyrighted. Always check The Library's Complete List of Journals to see if the article you want to assign to your students is included in one of the library’s full-text databases of approximately 20,000 journals. If it is, rather than download the article, the best system is to put only the link to the article on your Blackboard course pages. Some of the library’s databases include these durable links as part of each citation, or you may email the link to yourself to paste into your Blackboard pages. As the library has already purchased the content for our students and faculty, there are no copyright issues if you give students just the link.
For articles or books not available through one of our electronic databases, one of the best sets of copyright guidelines for faculty is the Crash Course in Copyright provided at the University of Texas under the open Creative Common License. Written by Georgia K. Harper, an attorney who oversees intellectual property for the Texas system, this is well-designed and clear.
In the fall of 2009, Columbia University's Copyright Advisory Office made their site http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/ available for public access. Including information for the public and for educators, the site also has sample forms to get permissions and updates on the Google e-book settlement.
The Copyright Office also has an excellent publication explaining copyright, Copyright Basics.
There are special "Fair Use" guidelines for educational use of print or physical copies found in the Copyright Office's Reproduction of Copyrighted Works for Educators and Librarians. Four criteria these guidelines list to determine if your use is fair use are:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The Reproduction of Copyrighted Works for Educators and Librarians includes much more detail on "Fair Use", including guidelines for portion limitations on how much of a work may be copied, for example:
See Reproduction of Copyrighted Works for Educators and Librarians for additional information on music, prohibitions on consumables (workbooks, etc.), and other media.
Regulations become much more rigorous when materials are uploaded to web sites. The TEACH
(Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization) Act was passed in 2002
to clarify "fair use" in the era of distance education and digitizing
of information, as well as use of reproductions of visual and sound media. This Act revised Section 110(2) and 112 of
the U.S. Copyright Law. It requires a university or college to "provide informational material" regarding copyright
and promote compliance with copyright laws to students, faculty, and staff. The American
Library Association has excellent information on copyright, including a
document on the
TEACH Act and Blackboard.
a) Make sure the portions of copyrighted material you are using in your course meet the standards of the Guidelines
- b) Put the copyrighted material in a section of your Blackboard course site that is secured (using Course Options
in the Control Panel). This should meet the distribution requirement, because
only students enrolled in your course will have access to that area.
- c) Copyrighted material could be made available (using the Availability option on your content) for no more than
a 15-day period, and your students should be instructed to not make their own copies of the material.
When downloading or linking to a database to which the library subscribes, licenses generally follow that of Ebsco, which states: "Licensee and Authorized Users may download or print limited copies of citations, abstracts, full text or portions thereof provided the information is used solely for personal, non-commercial use. Licensee and Authorized Users may not publish the information." If in doubt, each database has on its homepage a link to "Copyright" or "Terms and Conditions."
Note that some publishers have special conditions even when their journal is available through Ebsco or another aggregator. A prime example is Harvard Publishing. When you download an article from Harvard Business Review, you see the following statement:
- "Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business School Publishing content
on EBSCOhost is licensed for the individual use of authorized EBSCOhost patrons
at this institution and is not intended for use as assigned course material. Harvard Business School
Publishing is pleased to grant permission to make this work available through
'electronic reserves' or other means of digital access or
transmission to students enrolled in a course. For rates and authorization
regarding such course usage, contact permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu"
As stressed above, if the library subscribes to the journal, your best recourse is to put only the link to the article (URL) on your Blackboard course pages. The library has already purchased the content for our students and faculty.
Recommended documents and sites on copyright:
- Crash Course in Copyright
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/IntellectualProperty/cprtindx.htm#top
- Copyright Basics:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf
Reproduction of Copyrighted Works for Educators and Librarians
: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf
- Association of Research Libraries:
Know
Your Copy Rights "…a Web site for librarians who are developing positive
educational programs for academic users of copyrighted materials in US
not-for-profit institutions."
- Stanford University Libraries: Copyright & Fair Use includes excellent guidance in the procedures to obtain copyright permissions.
- Michael Brewer and the American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy has created a quick
and easy tool to answer questions:
http://www.librarycopyright.net/108spinner/. Their second "spinner" helps identify documents in the
public domain.
SCANNING DOCUMENTS TO PLACE ON BLACKBOARD
Once you determine that your use of a journal article or section of a book meets the Fair Use Guidelines (if they do not, you must seek permission from the copyright holder), and we do not have a subscription for the electronic journal, the article may be scanned from a paper copy which you possess or the library holds. The library provides two scanners for public use, and you or an assistant can scan the articles or portion of a book or other text document in the library. In most cases, the quickest and easiest way is to scan the page as an image and save it as a PDF file. Most scanner programs will save the documents to a "virtual" compact disc until you complete your work, and then prompt you to save to your "physical" compact disc.
As all scanners work somewhat differently, the library provides detailed printed instructions for use at the library’s scanner workstations and online
Assistance using the scanners is also available from the Electronic Services Librarian or any of the reference librarians.
After logging into Blackboard, the screen will display, under My Courses, all the instructor’s classes. The instructor should then choose the course to which he/she wishes to add the handout.
After selecting the appropriate class, a sidebar of links will appear on the left-hand side of the Blackboard screen. Choose Control Panel, which is located in the lower left corner.
After the Control Panel window appears, select Course Documents under the Content Areas heading. In the next step, the Course Document Management Console appears; this is where documents and files can be uploaded to the course. To add a document, select Add Item.
The next window to appear is the Add Content interface. During this step, name the document to be uploaded to the course. Then, through the Browse interface, locate the document to be uploaded. After locating the correct file, choose Open, to indicate the document to be uploaded.
Scroll down and click the Submit button. The document should then be visible to everyone enrolled in the class. Other options available at this time include restricting the available dates of the document and tracking the number of hits the document receives. It is always a good idea to go back to the general class interface, to see if the document uploaded and is displayed properly.
For detailed instructions, including screen shots, see our guide.
The duPont-Ball Library has a research guide available for uploading to your Blackboard websites, as well as course/subject specific web pages that have been developed to include the most useful resources for each subject.
If you need an instruction document that is more tailored to your class, please contact Susan Ryan (sryan@stetson.edu, ext, 7181) for assistance.
Compiled by Betty D. Johnson, duPont-Ball Library, 3/19/07. Last updated 11/19/09