VLA/VALL Conference Oct. 27-28, 2011

The joint conference was held at the Renaissance Portsmouth Hotel & Waterfront Conference Center

Photographs by Ben Almoite

Conference attendees were able to enjoy this view from their hotel

The Port Towne Magic Jazz Band at the conference's Grand Opening ceremony

Right after the ribbon cutting, with VLA President Matt Todd, Rebecca K. Miller and VLA Past President John A. Moorman

Eager librarians waiting to enter the exhibit hall

VLA President Matt Todd, with Keynote Speaker Rebecca Kamen

At the Opening General Session: Elizabeth Tai, Diantha McCauley, VALL President Michele Gernhardt, and VALL Vice-President/President Elect Suzanne B. Corriell

Portsmouth Mayor Kenneth I. White speaks at the Opening General Session


Keynote Speaker Rebecca Kamen, Professor of Art at Northern Virginia Community College


Printed book turned into artform by one of keynote speaker Rebecca Kamen's art students


From The Legally Literate Librarian session: Greg Stoner, Williams Mullen; Terry Long, VA State Law Library; and Jeanne Ullian, Williams Mullen


From the Conference Social: VALL President Michele Gernhardt and Ben Almoite, from the VA State Law Library


Librarians know how to have a good time at the conference social!


President Michele Gernhardt leads the VALL Business Meeting


The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum -- one of the local attractions conference attendees were able to enjoy





Lovely house in Olde Towne Portsmouth

Gone With The Wind:

The Literary Legal Complexities of a Bestselling Novel

By Donna Bausch

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South... Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow... Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind...”

Author Ellen Brown assured her VLA audience that she went to law school because she wanted to become a law librarian. Music to my ears. After graduating from the University of Richmond, and faced with significant law school loans, she practiced law at Hunton & Williams, Dominion Virginia Power and the Attorney General’s Office. Her passion for books eventually led her to open a rare book business and write for the publication Fine Books and Collections. On a visit to interview John Wiley, the world’s foremost collector of Gone With the Wind memorabilia, she recognized a gap in the scholarship, realizing that she would like to read a book that would tell the story of GWTW, the book itself.

Brown and Wiley decided to chronicle the legal history of the novel. Not an easy task. Mitchell’s papers, though housed at the University of Georgia, remain tightly controlled by the powerful Mitchell Estate. Mitchell has but a single living heir, an unmarried nephew in his 70’s. However, the Estate boasts a full panoply of lawyers to protect the interests of the Mitchell legacy. Brown and Wiley were the first authors granted permission to access Mitchell’s business papers. In addition, they traveled to archives and libraries all over the country in their quest to create an accurate chronology of the legal history of the book.

Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece continues to elude the respect it deserves. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and lost the Nobel Prize only to Pearl S. Buck.

How did lowly Margaret Mitchell land a book deal? There is the apocryphal fairy tale version of the story and then there is the truth. In the fairy tale, Harold Latham, prominent MacMillan editor discovers unknown housewife Mitchell’s manuscript. Latham was happy to let this version be believed, but in reality a young female Macmillan editor named Lois Cole was responsible. Mitchell’s publishers were disdainful and disrespectful of her. Mitchell garnered only $50,000 from the movie rights to the book.

An interesting aspect of the history of GWTW is the role of Stevens Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s brother, an estate and trust attorney with no experience in publishing, but the only attorney Margaret was willing to trust. From the time of her book deal forward, Mitchell’s life was completely overtaken by the book’s success and others attempting to capitalize on it. She felt exploited and was one of the earliest authors to assert rights to her intellectual property. The positions she took, though unsubstantiated when made, eventually became the law.

One example is the sequel. There was a rumor that a reader could send $1 to Macmillan and the “real” final chapter of GWTW would be sent to you. This was at a time when the price of the entire book was $3. Everyone wanted to know what had happened to Scarlett and Rhett. Unauthorized sequels abounded. There were contests to write a sequel and the winning entry posited an absurd kidnapping plot. Stevens Mitchell stood firm and the law of copyright eventually followed. No unauthorized sequels.

An even bigger issue was international copyright. GWTW was even more popular abroad than in the U.S. It was translated into countless languages. Technically, Macmillan owned the foreign rights, but decided to return them to Mitchell. This was a complex, burdensome mess. The U.S. was not then a signatory to the Berne Convention on Copyright. There had not been great demand for American authors’ works abroad, but conversely, our publishers could pirate foreign works with impunity. Mitchell ended up spending almost all her profit from the book on this fight. Her efforts eventually led to the 1950 move of the U.S. to join the Berne Convention.

Mitchell died childless in 1949. Her book was her child. Her litigious estate continued her fiercely protective maternal stance. Most books about Mitchell have been less than sympathetic. Brown urges us to view Mitchell as a strong southern woman who stood up for her rights at a time in history when this was not appreciated by the powerful. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the book and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. It’s time we give Margaret Mitchell and GWTW their due.

The words of Scarlett’s father about his beloved Tara can be applied to the book itself:

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ’tis the only thing in this world that lasts.”

If you were not able to hear Ellen Brown, “As God is My Witness”…you missed a wonderful program! Thanks to Gail Zwirner for proposing this fascinating program.

And, if you love GWTW as much as I do, run, don’t walk to your local bookstore and purchase:
Brown, Ellen F. and John Wiley. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Lanham: Taylor Trade, 2011.

Measuring the Soft Stuff

by Lara Dresser

Cynthia Hart, Virtual Librarian at Virginia Beach Public Library, gave an engaging presentation on combining social media strategies and web and marketing plans to increase a library’s Return on Investment (ROI) by building awareness, increasing customer satisfaction, and lowering costs.

It was not surprising to hear that socially engaged companies are more successful, people want to engage with companies on social media, and ‘good brands’ can evoke emotional responses. Suggestions included using social media to manage your brand, tell your story, advertise your services, and to simply be part of the conversation.

The discussion of social metrics focused on the importance of identifying your goals and finding ways to capture and quantify information that is generally qualitative, such as buzz, reach, sentiment, influence, and engagement, to determine if you’re meeting those goals.

A variety of online tools were presented, such as Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, Twitalyzer, and Webfollow, that allow you to measure various web and social media events. These tools give you access to valuable data such as downloads/uploads, time spent on pages, ratings, followers, subscribers, retweets, testimonials, ratings, reviews, shares, and click-throughs.

In addition to being entertaining, this presentation opened my eyes to the dizzying diversity of online tools that can be used in powerful and creative ways to promote libraries. It is exciting to imagine what’s next in this surprisingly diverse and constantly evolving intersection.

What Can I Do With This?:

Deciphering Copyright and Fair Use Notices

By Fred Dingledy

Librarians find themselves dealing with numerous issues in their everyday work; one of their least favorite issues is probably dealing with copyright. How much of a journal can you copy to fulfill an interlibrary loan request? Can a professor play a movie clip in a class without getting permission from the movie studio first? Overreaching copyright notices included in some publications don’t help matters, making the reader think that doing anything besides reading the article on the screen requires permission from the publisher. There are alternatives to traditional copyright licensing, such as Creative Commons, but those alternatives are not always well-known or understood.

To help answer librarians’ questions about copyright and fair use, Ben Keele and I from the William & Mary Law Library - presented “What Can I Do With This?: Deciphering Copyright and Fair Use Notices” at the VLA/VALL Joint Conference on October 27. The presentation was aimed at a non-law-librarian audience, so I began with an introduction to copyright basics: what rights a copyright holder gets, what can be copyrighted, what infringement is, the Section 108 defense to infringement for libraries, and fair use.

Next, Ben discussed the importance of copyright notices and where to find them: copyright notices are the best place to discover exactly what the copyright owner is willing to let you do without having to specifically ask their permission. However, as Ben pointed out, sometimes the copyright notice will try to preclude the user from exercising their fair use rights, as with the notice on the website for the journal Nature. Ben provided another example, though, of a database provider (EBSCO) that specifically allowed for fair use in its copyright notice.

Ben then went on to describe alternative models of licensing copyright, such as Creative Commons and the GPL (General Public License). These models allow the copyright holder to easily tell readers what they have permission to do with a work in standardized terms, such as allowing educational use but precluding commercial redistribution or requiring attribution.

The questions from the audience demonstrated the weakness of fair use as it currently stands: no one knows what it is. These days, public discussion of fair use seems to be dominated by antipodean camps: content owners who think there should be no such thing as fair use, and the “information wants to be free” group which believes that everything is fair use. Librarians, caught in between, want a clear answer: how much of a work can I copy and still have it fall under fair use? Unfortunately, the answer we have to give is: it depends. We outlined the factors that go into deciding fair use and provided links to worksheets that librarians can use to determine if their use would probably be considered a fair one. We also made sure to emphasize to the audience that they shouldn’t panic – as a rule, not many libraries have been sued for copyright infringement to date; while it’s always best and simplest to ask permission first if they’re not sure, as long as someone have analyzed the use ahead of time, if it seems like a fair use, librarians should be fine in proceeding.

We had a good time presenting at the conference – the volunteers were friendly and the audience asked good questions. We hope to be able to present again in the future!
The Powerpoint slideshow from the presentation is available at http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libpubs/28/ .

Questionable Content-Remove It? Keep It?

By Lara Dresser

Tim Coggins and Suzanne Corriell, from the University of Richmond School of Law, delved into the thorny topic of First Amendment restraints on collection management choices of libraries. Selection, removal, and even relocation of books in libraries have all been challenged on First Amendment grounds.

Despite the lack of clarity and cohesion in this area of the law, Corriell and Coggins did an excellent job of summarizing the salient points from the seminal U.S. Supreme Court case on book removal, Board of Education v. Pico, as well as relevant analysis from several lower courts. In a plurality opinion, Pico stated that the school board’s removal of books was impermissible if the intent was to deny access to ideas the school officials disagreed with. The key element in this case was motivation, and many lower courts have adopted this standard as well.

The message is that removal of materials is likely to be viewed as suspect, and that motivations that discriminate based on content or viewpoint are likely to be unconstitutional. Although courts have conceded that school boards have discretion to remove materials that are “pervasively vulgar,” lacking in “educational suitability,” and contain “factual inaccuracies,” public libraries probably have less discretion in the decision to remove materials.

Helpful tips included avoiding the appearance of arbitrariness and adopting and adhering to procedures. The presentation ended with a lively discussion about the University of Richmond School of Law’s experience with a patron objection to one of their resources. The presentation sparked interesting and robust debate on a critical issue all librarians should be contemplating!

Behind the Scenes of the Legally Literate Librarian

By Greg Stoner

At the recent VLA/VALL Annual Conference, I helped contribute to the program "The Legally Literate Librarian," with my colleague, Jeanne Ullian, and Terry Long, from the Virginia State Law Library. Our program focused on providing an introduction to commonly used legal terms and explaining how to read and interpret a case. While the topic may seem somewhat elementary, we imagined this presentation could be very helpful to librarians who encounter legal questions in their work and may not be able to understand a legal citation or have little familiarity with core resources such as reporters, legal dictionaries and encyclopedias.

I found that the process of planning a program and working with a team of dedicated VALL members was personally very rewarding. Isabel Paul, who was unable to be at the conference, helped us brainstorm about ways to approach the topic and concepts to cover. Jeanne quickly took the lead on the project and helped develop the program plan, identified a case to discuss, and compiled a series of useful handouts for the attendees. I worked on creating the PowerPoint presentation, and Terry contributed sage advice and additional ideas for the program. In the end, I think we all helped contribute to a program that combined our experience and unique insights in working with different types of patrons (attorneys, judges, public, etc.). Our feedback was very positive and suggested the program was right on target for many of our attendees.

Overall, as noted, I very much enjoyed being able to help out in delivering a program of interest to such a diverse audience. It is my hope that this program, as well as others held at the conference, draws attention to the hard work going on in law libraries and the dedication of our members to promoting legal information literacy to the larger community.

For those VALL members who are considering presenting in the future, I highly encourage it! Not only will you be able to help others learn - you will probably learn something too. My thanks to Jeanne, Terry, Isabel and Ben Almoite (who gave our group a great introduction) - it was both an honor and a pleasure working with you!

Private Screenings:

Using Short Individualized Screencasts as a Library Instruction Modality for Off-Campus Students

by Suzanne Corriell

Can you use the power of pictures in your job as a reference librarian? Yes, you can – easily, effectively, and economically, according to Brad MacDonald, Distance Learning Librarian for Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Lynchburg.

MacDonald’s program focused on the process for creating short, customized tutorials specifically tailored to student research requests. This program looks at “screencasting” in a different light from many other library conference programs: MacDonald is not a perfectionist. He advocates for loosely scripted screencasts, done on the fly, in response to a single student query.

MacDonald recognized the power of pictures in education when in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea. While there, he worked with over 11,000 graphical technology documents on microfiche. At 9000 feet elevation (and in a time of no internet), these documents’ graphics were used to teach about agriculture and water use. Once he began working as a distance reference librarian, he realized that he could use the same techniques for teaching through pictures using screencasts.

Distance learning students submit requests to MacDonald using a form created on EmailMeForm; information to be provided on the form includes professor, due date, and databases and keywords already searched. MacDonald then uses Jing to create a short, customized screencast to send to the student showing all of the steps to complete the request.

When responding to the student, he sends an email with a brief explanation (including length) of the video, a reminder to turn on the speakers, a suggestion to view the video once before re-watching it to take notes, and an offer to follow up if the video’s steps are unclear or the student needs further guidance. MacDonald later sends a user satisfaction feedback survey (using a Google Docs survey) to find out if the process worked for the student and if the student would use it again.

The program showed that screencasting can be done inexpensively, without a significant time or monetary investment. Jing videos are limited to five minutes, requires no download on the recipient’s side, and are stored remotely. It seems like an ideal method to demonstrate to a student how to conduct a search in an appropriate database or highlight new features in a database for faculty members. Just don’t forget to turn on the speakers!