The Digital Librarian's Legal Handbook

Keep your library - and yourself - out of court with the 'must know' answers to critical questions about intellectual property rights for digital collections. Here are authoritative answers to the critical legal questions that make digital collection development and management so challenging and complex for librarians, educators, technology leaders, information science educators and anyone involved with digitized content. This new work examines the intersection of digital library technology, and digital content, and the law. John N. Gathegi, Director of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida is uniquely qualified to address these questions from his decades of work as an attorney, author, speaker, and as a faculty member. From an opening discussion of general intellectual property issues to the application of copyright law to digital collections, the handbook covers all the key topics in the field of intellectual property including several new issues, such as the problems of non-permanence, the complexity of multimedia content, issues surrounding open and closed access, evaluating data providers, proprietary search engines, derivative works, annotations and metadata, privacy, and more. Practitioners will also appreciate the book's practical checklists, sample contracts, compliance tools, and sample policies. Anyone looking for a definitive guide to intellectual property applied to the world of digital content will keep and use this book as an ongoing source of insight and critical information.