From Library Babel Fish, June 29, 2011
An interesting question came up the other day on COLLIB-L, a discussion list for college librarians. A librarian reported that a student who was abroad discovered he couldn’t access videos in a library database. An error message appeared saying access would constitute a “copyright violation.” Though the library had licensed the material for its patrons, including that student, he was unable to view it because he happened to have traveled to another region. He wondered whether he might have the same problem with articles in databases.
I’d never run into students studying abroad being unable to access our databases (unless they didn’t have their campus ID with them, with its barcode used to validate their identity as an authorized member of our community). But a librarian responding to the initial message said he ran into problems when vendors cut off access pending investigation of strange activity in an odd location. His campus is on Guam. Apparently, many vendors don’t know that’s a US territory and act, thinking some foreigners have breached their security.
All this is part of publishers and vendors defending their products from those who haven’t paid. As has been reported elsewhere, the American Chemical Society is taking measures to go after unauthorized use of passwords for their database, SciFinder Scholar. These passwords are not lightly shared. At my college, we have an arrangement with two other schools to put up tens of thousands of dollars annually so we can share two seats. That means that among all of the faculty and students at three institutions, two of them can conduct a search at the same time. They have to be patient, because often when they want to run a search the two seats are full. We have no other databases as expensive or as restricted as this one.
By the way, when you go through the difficult process of creating a password for this database (it’s one of those picky systems that pretty much guarantees you will never be able to remember the complicated password you created) you have to swear that you will not use any of the information you access for anything other than personal use and study. If you actually do something with that information, you are supposed to pay more.
The American Chemical Society may be an extreme example, but they aren’t alone in being stingy about library use. Now science, technology, and medical publishers want to ensure that their articles have to clear customs before libraries can provide interlibrary loan across national borders. This proposed policy was apparently prompted by a statement from the Association of Research Libraries reiterating a long-standing conviction that loaning materials across international borders is A Good Thing. This isn’t to say it’s a free lunch. Libraries are restricted in how much they can borrow without having to pay copyright fees. The 5/5 rule states that only five articles from any one journal published within the most rece