Every year around this time, libraries, archives, and allied institutions and groups celebrate Fair Use Week, a time to recognize the power and importance of the fair use doctrine in our daily lives. Fair use is the First Amendment safety valve in copyright law, allowing use of in-copyright works without payment or permission when the use serves copyright’s purpose without intruding unfairly on the copyright holder’s commercial prerogatives.
This year we have two features from the University of Virginia Library’s Director of Information Policy, Brandon Butler:
First, a piece cross-posted with Harvard University about copyright (and, specifically, fair use) and its application in cases of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
The Milky Way Galaxy seen over the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array west of Socorro, New Mexico. (NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman)
The U.S. military has shot down four aerial objects in recent weeks, most recently an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Sunday. As more attention is being paid to the skies in the wake of these events (as well as after a government report on unidentified aerial phenomena was released in 2021), it might not be considered too “out there” to speculate about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
The reopening of the new main library, Alderman, is just under a year away, but Beth Blanton, Director of Collections, is already deep in the process of mapping the book move into the new space. “I realized I have more than 50 spreadsheets — I stopped counting — keeping track of the collections in the book move,” she said, reflecting on a process that directly involves more than a dozen Library staff members and will touch more than a million printed books.
The process involves a complex “staging” that starts at Ivy Stacks, where most of the books are currently shelved. Since items in Ivy Stacks are sorted by size to allow for maximum efficiency in shelving, they need to be fully reorganized and merged into a browsable order before returning to their shelf locations in Alderman and Clemons.
In his “Sonnet 116” William Shakespeare describes what he sees as the truest kind of love — the marriage of two minds.
“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
David R. Whitesell, who retired as curator in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in 2022, explains how pioneers of photographic processes in the 19th century changed how books were illustrated.
Pat Oliphant, whose syndicated political cartoons anchored editorial pages in newspapers across the country from 1965 to 2015 – many of which are part of his work archived in the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library –died Monday at the age of 90.
While Jeffersonian in appearance, the new roofs incorporate modern technology. ... Will Rourk, a technology specialist with the UVA Library, [used] his laser scanner at the roof project to take 3D scans.
The University of Virginia’s Small Special Collections Library is opening its doors for a printing event celebrating America’s 250th birthday, giving attendees their own replica of the original Declaration of Independence.
