ILS 599 Plan to Improve Story Time at Greenville Public Library: Part 5

Part 5: Negative consequences, and how they will be dealt with

Staff training:

Issues such as time concerns (time needed to train staff, time to maintain) was addressed in the last section of my proposal. Initial time to set up accounts is low. Initially, only a few staff need training how to use the camera, upload, and post recordings; if staff members express interest to learn/help, we can create a rotating schedule of story tellers and recorders.

Library blog: spam and vandalism

The intent of the story time blog is to not only give information, but also receive feedback from the community. The story time blog will allow open commenting: allowing people who are not a member of a group to comment. We will have a blog commenting policy that will clearly state that we will not accept and will delete hate speech, insulting and off topic comments, etc. I also plan on having to read and grant approval to comments before than could be posted to help ensure appropriate language and content.

Copyright issues:

Reading stories from our collection at the Greenville Public Library story time is not a copyright infringement. A book has been purchased for the library’s collection, it is for a non-commercial program, and we read the book out loud, as intended; the library does not need to seek the copyright owner (author or publisher) for permission to read their book, it does not infringe upon any copyright laws because it does not change the format of the copyrighted material nor are we distributing this performance to a wider audience.

The main focus of my proposal is to record readings of children’s stories and make these recordings available to a possibly huge online audience. If we choose the same modern books to record, such as Mo Willem’s Don’t Let Pigeon Drive the Bus, we could face serious copyright infringement and possible violation of the copyright owner’s rights. In this case, we would not part of the book, we would be copying (in this case reading) the entirety of the book. We would also be changing the format of the work from a physical book into a recording of a book onto audio tape, video tape, or digital video. The last possible infringement would be the distribution and transmission of the book in an unauthorized manner (using a public forum like YouTube would make the last infringement even more serious, as it would have a much wider audience.)

My proposal would circumvent a wide array of potential copyright issues. I propose using works published in the U.S. prior to 1923 that are not copyrighted in the U.S. would circumvent potential copyright issues. My proposal does not include recently published books and only using books that are currently in the Public Domain or are part of the Creative Commons and makes copyright consideration simple and much less risky. I do hope to be able to eventually be able to use more modern works, which will occur once more copyrights expire, another way would be for authors to grant the license for others to freely use their book or work for non commercial purposes.