We were at the IFLA WLIC in Wroclaw, Poland last week where the IFLA Information Literacy Section Committee and the IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters Committee organised an off-site meeting on Wednesday 23rd August entitled Models of Copyright Education in Information Literacy Programs. When I heard about this event I knew I had to be there – copyright and information literacy are my two research interests, and have been for many years before Chris and I undertook the UK Copyright Literacy Survey. This conference was an exciting opportunity for us both to meet international colleagues working in the field of copyright education, to learn about the models and strategies from around the world and to share the experiences of our research.

We were absolutely thrilled to be invited to be part of the opening panel at the conference, discussing the findings from the International Copyright Literacy Survey. Early on in the discussions about this event we agreed we should be joined by Inga-Lill Nilsson from Karlstad University who has been working on embedding copyright literacy in Sweden. It was great to get together members of the international team including Serap Kerbanoglu from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, Tania Todorova from University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, Angela Repanovici from Transilvania University, Brasov, Romania, Ane Landoy from University of Bergen, Norway and Alicia Aria Coello from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Alicia, Tania and Angela sadly couldn’t be there in Poland but contributed to the paper in advance. We have made our slides available from the panel on Slideshare. We briefly gave an overview of the high level findings from the survey, but concentrated on asking panel members to reflect on the efforts to embed copyright literacy in their country and share strategies that were working. What emerged was a real need for more education for librarians about copyright matters in all countries around the world. However, it isn’t about turning librarians into lawyers and teaching them everything about copyright. Copyright education needs to be relevant to the wider work of librarians, and part of information literacy initiatives.

 

The event was really well organised, so congratulations to Lisa Hinchliffe from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tomas Lipinski from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee  and Janice T. Pilch at Rutgers University for their hard work. The University of Lower Silesia were an excellent host institution and we’d like to thank Ewa Rozkosz, Director of the Scientific Information Centre who took Chris and I on a brief tour of Wroclaw after the conference. Sheila Webber from the University of Sheffield has written three blog posts on themes from the day including professional education for librarians, librarians teaching faculty and students and her final post on copyright literacy in higher education. Sadly she missed our opening panel, but her three posts give an excellent account of the day. So rather than run through the presentations from the day, this is going to be the first of several blog posts we’ll write and I’d like to start by reflecting on a few themes that I think were particularly significant from the conference.

Firstly, the day started by considering why we might need to develop copyright education in the first place – what the motivations are for this and why knowing about copyright might be particularly important for librarians today. Themes such as technology, international efforts to reform copyright law and the information and mis-information that circulates about copyright matters were all mentioned.