Classroom Copyright Caper – Slides and Workshop Highlights (Refined Researchers Series)

This past Tuesday, as part of our Refined Researchers series, I gave a workshop on copyright with an emphasis about how it interacts with the classroom (and some other ideas, all generally meant to help with knowing how to best use it and ask about it). It was a good time from my presenter’s viewpoint, with plenty of attendees from all walks of campus life – faculty, grad, undergrad, and guests – asking good and interesting questions and I hope they enjoyed themselves and learned something. It was a fair number of slides, 90+, with information ranging from copyright history to getting permission to use something, so it would be hard to sum up here. Instead, I am going to include the slides below as a slideshow, and you can download the current draft as a PDF (note, right at 10mb). I am releasing the whole thing Creative Commons 4.0 “With Attribution”, so if you would like to use any of the information or my top-notch fancy drawings in a class, or wherever, feel free. Did I say fancy drawings? Sure did, here’s a quick sample for you:

Try and not be too amazed. Due to something like a fluke, I ended up using a blue trapezoid to represent copyrighted work, with a red one to represent transformed versions, and green circles to represent uses by others. Hopefully simple iconography will help. If any of the diagrams are confusing, though, just email me and I’ll explain a little bit better.

The version below is slightly different from the version presented. There were some attendee submitted questions (and a couple of frequently asked questions) that I had worked into the slides as answer prompts. Those have been omitted due to them needing full context. I’ve made sure to double check a few facts, and have worked in a few attributions better. I have included a section on Distance Learning that had to be cut. I’ve also cleaned up a couple of bits of confusing language, and changed, slightly, the slide order to make sub-sections a little more consistent. As a heads up, there are a few slides where the slideshow makes the formatting funny. I am unsure why, but most are still readable even with the unexpected line breaks.

Classroom Copyright Caper PDF (note, this resizes it to smaller than Google Drive’s method, which makes it several times larger)

You can also access it as a Google Slides document if you think you would like to see it as such. You should be able to save it to your Google Drive account or download it as PPTX file and edit it (you can also click the gear icon on the slide show above for some of these options).

Just reminder, there are currently four Refined Rearchers workshops left in this semester. Click that link to learn more.

The joy of seeing a persistent design shine in the wild of the stacks

The other day, I was walking through our journal stacks on N1 (i.e., the northern bit of the first floor) and I spotted a delightful little oddity, which is best summed up in a picture:

Physical Review D, a persistent spine design throughout the decades

What you are looking at, there, is Physical Review D: Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology*, published by the American Physical Society. For as long as we have original-binding print copies (about 20 years from the mid-90s through 2011**), they have persisted with the design choice of that color blue, with each issue being numbered in a bar that has been in the same persistent place so that the issue numbers cascade down.

A slightly closer look at it:

Physical Review D, a persistent spine design throughout the decades

Being the sort of guy who works with design and around design, I can appreciate the rare glory that is a decades maintained design decision. I suspect this is the sort of thing that can exist more so in the world of academic publishing, where relevant regularly published content is literally the point, than in most forward-facing content, which has to invoke a sense of activity to convince people that the the same-old content is relevant (soda, for instance, keeps the same formula for years, but changes the can every year). I personally find it beautiful, and wanted to share.

I wonder if APS has a design bible they consult, a series of Pantone-complaint color sheets? I wonder who started the cascade, and if there have been design meetings about whether to change it?

A lot of book cover talk is aimed at flashy new covers and what they mean (and whether movie tie-in covers are brilliant or anathema) or how sunset-soaked acacia trees show an unfortunate trend in perceptions about Africa, but let us not forget the other side: some book covers are a process that began years ago and represent a simple permanence rather than playing to our expectations (often by feeding our own expectations and desires back to us).


Footnotes and Attributions:

* Impact Factor of 4.691. ISSN: 1550-7998 (print), 1550-2368 (online).
** Our physical range, including all the rebound volumes, goes all the way back to Volume 1 and our online coverage of the title covering the entire run.

The header is a joking reference to the Youtube video “The Expert”, about the design process and appealing to demographics [and ignoring the the expert in the room]. Did you spot the red lines drawn in transparent ink? The line-art kitten is used from http://princessentiafarms.deviantart.com/art/Free-Simple-Kitten-Lineart-289717626, with credit to PrincessentiaFarms.