In this article, the author states that school librarians can contribute to an atmosphere that supports intellectual freedom by drawing attention to the subtle messages about community values--messages that are communicated by virtue of what is included or excluded from curricular and co-curricular offerings. The author address issues with…

This paper aims to present the role, values, and legal policy issues facing public Library resources in supporting students to achieve academic success. Research indicates that majority of people that own or work in the Library tend to ignore some of the vital roles, values and legal policy issues paramount to libraries. Some of these issues are…

Public libraries are heavily affected by political and policy-making processes that shape the funding, activities, and roles of libraries in society, with the explosion of information policy decisions in the past two decades significantly increasing the responsibilities of libraries while also increasing limitations on their activities. Research…

For many years, debates over telecommunications network policy were marked by a relative lack of partisan and ideological conflict. In the last decade, this has changed markedly. Today, debates over a whole set of issues, including broadband competition, net neutrality, copyright, privacy, and others, have become more contentious. These…

Legislation introduced in Congress last month (the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act") would take an aggressive and needed stand against online piracy, a growing problem that hurts American consumers and costs Americans jobs. Critics of the legislation argue that this bill would hurt free speech, encourage censorship in foreign…

Whilst the copying, falsification and plagiarism of essays and assignments has long been a prevalent form of academic misconduct amongst undergraduate students, the increasing use of the internet in higher education has raised concern over enhanced levels of online plagiarism and new types of "cyber-cheating". Based on a self-report…

A decade ago, before the tech boom collapsed and the digital economy bubble burst, it seemed to some that issues surrounding information technology (IT) might be central to the politics of the early 21st century. But after September 11, 2001, with so much else on everyone's minds, "digital politics" seemed a boring sideshow. Technocrats,…

This selected bibliography contains 63 publications and 21 Web sites that can help librarians learn more about how they can use the metaphor of the information commons to advocate for the public's information assets. (MES)

Online copyright problems may be resolvable by a simple permission method. Describes Project Xanadu, a system of hypermedia publishing servers, designed to preserve integrity, copyright, and royalty for digital materials, yet allow reuse. Discusses permission doctrine; aspects of supporting software; legal status of transcopyright; variations not…

Discusses the development a national information policy in the United Kingdom (UK): policies for national information infrastructures, electronic information services, privacy and data protection, copyright, public and national libraries; reviews problems inhibiting Internet use; compares the UK's and the European Commission's approaches to…

Describes several projects aimed at building the Information Commons, including: Knowledge Conservancy plans to create a database of all freely available digitized content; the Universal Library, a project with the long-term goal of providing free, online access to all books; and several projects of the Creative Commons intended to build a robust…

Technology-savvy instructors often require students to create Web pages or videos, tasks that require finding materials such as images, music, or text on the Web, reusing them, and then republishing them in a technique that author Howard Pitler calls "remixing." However, this requires both the student and the instructor to deal with often thorny…

The Copyright Forum serves as a venue for the discussion of digital copyright issues of interest to Canadian educational institutions, libraries, archives, and museums. The Forum currently comprises 13 national associations. The members of the participating associations are both creators and users of digital intellectual content, and a number of…

Examines the interconnected issues surrounding domain naming. Discusses "dot" ownership, top-level domain expansion, control of second-level domain names, and trademarks and copyright protections. Outlines the history extending from the development of the pre-Internet ARPANET to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers…

This report analyses the disclosure issues raised by technically-imposed restrictions on the use of digital content. It focuses on the application of copy control and digital rights management technologies in three areas: copy-protected CDs; online music, and DVD regional coding. In each of these areas, the report examines the kinds of…