I, too, would like to thank the Chair and members of the committee for the invitation to appear in front of you here today.
My name is Eddy Campbell. I'm the president and vice-chancellor of the University of New Brunswick. With today is Lesley Balcom, who is the dean of our libraries at the University of New Brunswick. I'll say just a few words about us to begin.
We are the province's largest university, doing 75% of all the publicly funded research done in New Brunswick. We help drive the New Brunswick economy. We contribute $1.2 billion per year to the provincial economy, which is just over 5% of the GDP. Our emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation has helped launch more than 100 start-ups in the province since 2010. The vast majority of those have been led by our students, who we encourage to participate in that activity.
I am here today, as my colleague Donna has already suggested, in support of the statements you have heard already from Universities Canada, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, and others. We are speaking in favour of the preservation of fair dealing for education. I am here because this issue is very important to our university. I thought it might be interesting to you—and relevant to your work—to hear from a particular university about the kinds of activities that we have undertaken in order to be compliant with the legislation.
We are committed to the responsible sharing of copyrighted materials. Our system of compliance is led by our UNB libraries copyright office, which was created in 2009. The focus of this education is fair dealing assessment and transactional purchasing. Our full-time copyright officer, Joshua Dickison, is in the audience over here behind us. His job is to work directly with our faculty to build understanding of copyright, and to promote a culture of respectful use. The bedrock of this relationship is UNB's course reserves delivery system. This is embedded, in turn, in our learning management system, which ensures the responsible sharing of materials. It operates at the course section level, restricting access to materials by term and by course registrant. One of the important things it allows us to do is identify material that we should purchase through targeted transactional licences.
Here are some of the numbers that we have to offer. There are 1,000 courses vetted through the system. We have 6,000 items placed on reserve each year. There are about 1,000 scanned documents that will be reviewed for whether or not they're fair dealing, or whether or not we require a transactional licence to use them. We have a budget of some $5,000 a year to purchase transactional licences. When we discover that material is going to be used more than once, we add it to our collection for course reserve. About $7,000 a year is processed in that particular way. The total cost of copyright support at our university is some $200,000 a year.
Like all of the universities in the country—ours, in particular—we feel we have a strong responsibility to the creative community. We have a significant creative community at the university, and we support a significant creative community within the province. We have a creative writing program, for example, that ranges from the undergraduate to the Ph.D. level. Almost all of these people are published in some form or other during the course of their careers at the university. We also support the local literary community in New Brunswick. As the University of New Brunswick, we have a responsibility to purchase multiple copies of materials that New Brunswick authors are producing. We also have a responsibility to celebrate and promote their accomplishments. We do this on a regular basis. It is very important to us.
Our investment in library resources is increasing every year. We spent $3.5 million on acquisitions in 2009. Today that's $5.2 million. Although we have made every effort, we have lost access to some very valuable resources over that particular time. We view the pressure on library spending to be very intense.
In conclusion, I'd just like to say that we believe we are responsible. We pay for what we use. We actively support our creative community. We invest heavily in ensuring that our students have access to the materials they need to be the leaders of tomorrow. Fair dealing for education is an important part of that landscape.
Thank you.