Dean and Library Administrators

Your institution’s senior leadership should be engaged in the decision to embark on a large-scale copyright review (for CRMS, this means the university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan Library). A dean of libraries or equivalent leader ought to be made aware of your project before approving it and should be apprised of any significant course corrections throughout the project’s timeline.

The reasons to secure high-level approval from your institution are straightforward. First, proper copyright review at any scale is a significant investment of resources, and institutional leaders must be ready and willing to allocate proper resources to the activity. If there is no financial commitment in the form of funding or dedicated staff hours, then any copyright review project is unlikely to meet its objectives. Second, as copyright review is a human endeavor, mistakes in copyright determinations are inevitable, and course corrections are occasionally necessary. Therefore, it is important that leaders never be blindsided by your activities; instead, they ought to be well informed about any legal risks your project may present. Finally, informed leaders can be more effective advocates for your project. They can spread the word about your work, opening doors for potentially valuable collaborations.

However, we do not advocate for overinvolving the highest leaders of your institution. CRMS does not engage the dean of libraries in most of the daily operations of the project—we communicate big-picture activities and changes, make our human resource needs known to library administrators, and communicate the reasonable limits of what can be accomplished with the resources available to us.

Office of General Counsel

For our purposes, alignment and frequent, frank communication with the Office of General Counsel is crucial to the overall success of CRMS. A general counsel can help a copyright determination project consider process, recalibrate (if necessary), and check assumptions against reasonable and good-faith standards. Our relationship with general counsel is an important asset to the CRMS process, and any institution intending to embark on large-scale copyright review should recognize the importance of good counsel for this process.

If your institution lacks counsel well versed in copyright law, you will want to seriously consider your options for securing an advisor who can align legal analysis with tempered, institution-level judgment. Institutions facing this issue should consider the formation of an advisory group (detailed below).

HathiTrust Leadership

Although CRMS works closely with HathiTrust (also hosted at the University of Michigan), administratively it is a separate project. HathiTrust implements CRMS copyright determinations, and it is ultimately HathiTrust leadership that decides how to interpret and execute the determinations CRMS reviewers make. HathiTrust leadership establishes and enforces strict security protocols related to its digital volumes, facilitates access to HathiTrust collections whenever legally permissible, and is the final authority on all collections-related decision making.

Since its inception, CRMS has been closely aligned with HathiTrust and its leadership. Our working relationships with HathiTrust’s executive director and Rights and Access Working Group have been vital to the success of the project.[10] The collaborative environment of HathiTrust has also informed the structure of CRMS. Our reviewers have historically been members of the HathiTrust community, and the success of CRMS is a direct result of multi-institutional collaboration. While CRMS is an independent project, our mission has meshed well with the values and needs of HathiTrust and its members.

Advisory Working Group

Copyright review is often complex. An advisory group of copyright experts can provide historical context, help to avoid pitfalls or flawed logic, and connect your project with much-needed expertise. Even copyright experts may disagree on interpretations of current law, so having a range of experienced opinions will help to ensure that issues are addressed from a variety of perspectives.

The CRMS Advisory Working Group was formed in 2011 as a key part of the second National Leadership Grant from the IMLS to support CRMS. This working group offers recommendations related to CRMS processes, assists in validating our legal analysis, identifies areas for improvement, and works through related areas of inquiry. The members volunteer their time and expertise, offer regular feedback through e-mail correspondence, and provide general policy direction and recommendations in areas of first impression.