From my perspective, if nothing changes, universities will continue to manage copyright effectively and responsibly. We will continue to use the fair-dealing guidelines and policies we have in place, the 10% guideline you are familiar with, and continue to offer services to aid instructors in the responsible management of copyright. Many institutions now offer what are called “syllabus services”, which within libraries are called “electronic reserve services”. With those services, individual faculty members or instructors submit their reading lists to staff, and each item is vetted and then made available to students. Frequently, library licences are responsible for a big chunk of the stuff being made available to students.
In his remarks, Michael mentioned open educational resources. Anything that's available by open access, or even openly available on the web, is made available in that way. We also apply fair dealing, and if anything falls outside of it, we'll purchase it in e-book form in our library or we'll buy a transactional licence. There is also still print reserve, so if you can't purchase a transactional licence and it doesn't fall under fair dealing, we will put it on print reserve and students will have to come to check it out of the library. From our perspective, that's what we would continue to do. That is the good part.
As for the things we would change, there are a lot of things that are causing issues for libraries in relation to digital disruption. As mentioned, a lot of the stuff we're collecting has shifted from individual purchases of items to licences. Most of the things in a library are governed by licensing agreements. We don't have a lot of the exceptions that we would like to be available for those things. In our forthcoming brief, hopefully we will be able to discuss a few of those ideas.