Industry committee  We're all working within the college environment, which contains learning management systems, and libraries are working within those learning management systems themselves. Even though the Ontario community college libraries may have varying systems.... Seneca doesn't, in fact, have the same one as in the Sault.

Industry committee  Well, I hear rumours that it might not be the case in the near future, but right now we are all colleges.

Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  I did a survey when I received permission to speak of the 24 Ontario community colleges. Most have opted out. Of the 24, there are four or five that still have licences with Access Copyright. I will point out that collection budgets, the size of the library, and the size of the student and faculty populations really vary across the community colleges in Ontario.

Industry committee  We are currently dealing with over 80 vendors of digital content for our students. If a faculty decides they want a student to purchase a textbook, that's arranged through the bookstore and the student is required to purchase the textbook. We have nothing to do with that. In the case of faculty wanting supplementary material, or to create a digital course pack using the resources the library has paid for by sending the students to different articles, journals, newspapers, and even e-books, they have that option now.

Industry committee  This is very close to my heart because I was the project lead for copyright literacy in Ontario for a community colleges project. Of these modules—there are almost 20 of them—seven of them are specific to fair dealing in copyright, as the Copyright Act lays out fair dealing. We have very specific modules that are based on questions that faculty have come to us and asked—for example, whether they can post a particular YouTube video for their class on course management systems.

Industry committee  We based those modules on the Copyright Act itself, consulting with CICan, which was ACCC at the time of creation, that deals with creators and authors as well as the educators and legal counsel. We tried to touch on as many areas as we could in creating these.

Industry committee  I feel that's correct, although I would say that my recollection isn't exact in terms of when we took the faculty questions and created these modules. Many of the faculty we consulted with may have been creators themselves.

Industry committee  From the Ontario college libraries' perspective, we recognize that they don't seem to have the resources to make any decisions. We've heard many things over the years about how long it's taking and about how we are losing creators in Canada because the Copyright Board is not making certain decisions in a timely way.

Industry committee  I was recently at a conference in Washington, D.C., on computers and libraries, and one of the things they noted at that conference was that there are three tiers now for authors. There is the gold tier where the author will actually pay the publisher to include their work in the publisher's publication in order to get that recognition.

Industry committee  Right now, I'm not involved with the intellectual property negotiations between authors and administration at the college, so I couldn't speak to that specifically. I do know that from the library perspective, if an author makes us aware that they're publishing, we purchase a copy for the library whether it's in e-form or print form, whatever the author prefers.

Industry committee  Thank you. In the case of the colleges, because of the money we are putting into our licensing of digital resources, when faculty are looking to create course materials, they are looking to our databases, where we have paid a licensing fee. As I noted, we are paying for more and more user licensing within the contracts with individual vendors.

Industry committee  We have no idea of that. We are engaging with the vendors specifically on the databases we want or the e-books, and we can only engage because many of our faculty are authors as well at Senecaand across the Ontario community colleges. We can only assume that vendors are being fair to their authors and their creators, but we have no way of knowing that individually.

Industry committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Mr. Vice-Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. As you've heard, my name is Joy Muller. I'm associate director of Seneca College libraries here in Toronto, and manager of Seneca's copyright services.