UCLA Litbrarian

2008 will see the launch of Open Humanities Press, an open access effort to publish rigorously peer-reviewed contemporary critical and cultural theory.  Among the editorial board are UCLA’s own N. Katherine Hayles and Douglas Kellner.

To hear more about OHP, save the date for this event:

Professors Sigi Jottkandt and Gary Hall on The Open Humanities Press
Thursday, April 3, 2008, 3:00-4:30, 135 Humanities Instructional Building

The Open Humanities Press (OHP) will be launched this year. It is a bold and exciting new initiative, committed to open access and the free exchange of scholarly knowledge, an on-line publisher of contemporary critical and cultural theory that was formed in response to the growing inequality of readers’ access to critical materials necessary for research in the humanities. It is a consortium of peer-reviewed open access journals in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism. The editorial board, including Alain Badiou, Wlad Godzich, Stephen Greenblatt, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Hillis Miller, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Gayatri Spivak, among others, has recently completed its review of the first journals to be included in the OHP.
Sigi Jottkandt will speak on “The Open Humanities Press: Free/Libre Scholarship,” and Gary Hall will present “Liquid Theory.”

Sigi Jottkandt is a Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, The Netherlands; Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, and Co-Editor of www.lineofbeauty.org

Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts, School of Art and Design, Coventry University; Co-editor of Culture Machine; Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive; Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press.

This white paper will be of interest to those of you who are teaching, but it applies more broadly to scholarship as well.

For immediate release:
December 12, 2007

For more information, contact:
Prue Adler
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
prue@arl.org

ARL Releases White Paper on Educational Fair Use

Washington, DC—The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a white paper, “Educational Fair Use Today,” by Jonathan Band, JD. Band discusses three recent appellate decisions concerning fair use that should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege.

In all three decisions discussed in the paper, the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning of these opinions could have far-reaching implications in the educational environment.

Band summarizes the three cases—Blanch v. Koons, Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com, and Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley —and analyzes the significance of the appellate decisions in the educational context.

The paper is freely available for download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/educationalfairusetoday.pdf .

Jonathan Band helps shape the laws governing intellectual property and the Internet through a combination of legislative and appellate advocacy. He has represented clients with respect to the drafting of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); database protection legislation; the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act; and other statutes relating to copyrights, privacy, spam, cybersecurity, and indecency. He complements this legislative advocacy by filing amicus briefs in significant cases related to these provisions. Jonathan Band is located on the Web at http://www.policybandwidth.com/.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.

The UCLA campus will be closed for its annual Winter Holiday from Saturday, December 22, 2007 through Tuesday, January 1, 2008. Accordingly, all UCLA Library buildings will be closed during this period and will reopen on Wednesday, January 2, 2008. Note: this applies to UCLA Library libraries (libraries that report to the University Librarian); affiliated libraries like the Grace M. Hunt Memorial English Reading Room may have different schedules.

UCLA is able to shut down HVAC systems during this annual closure, enabling the campus to save a great deal of money and energy. Closing the libraries contributes additional savings in terms of staffing and security costs. Campus libraries will reopen on January 2, 2008. 

Happily, you will be able to enjoy uninterrupted access to online resources, should you feel the need to spend your vacation doing research. I, for one, plan to attend the 2007 Modern Languages Association convention in Chicago…