THE EFFECT OF COPYRIGHT ON LIBRARIES: ONE ASSESSMENT

I have worked in libraries for nearly three decades and have adopted as a maxim “the right books in the right hands at the right time”. For a variety of reasons it is not always possible to have the “right book” as such and a good working substitute is often a photocopy. One major area where photocopies are a practical means of provision is in our student collection, the Reserve Collection, where one or at most three copies are held. This makes available information which should be read at an appropriate place in a course. We believe that in the future a financial penalty will be incurred and will be hard to meet. This type of copying will fall under “systematic single copying”, an iniquitous catch‐all phrase. In the past we have taken pride in the fact that with efficient management by the library, co‐operation with academic staff and good sense from our students we could provide whatever was needed with a high level of certainty. The effect of militant copyright holders if unchecked will seriously impede us in achieving our aims and this will be one more factor in turning our graduates from people with wide information horizons into narrowly trained technocrats. We must ask if this is in the national interest. We are and will be in intense competition with other nations. Wrong use of copyright alone will not create this adverse state; it is but one element along with the high rate of inflation in books and journals, VAT at above zero rating, uncritical publication, repetitive publication, increasingly adverse staff/student ratios, bureaucratic dominance, policies that enforce a blinkered approach and deny imagination and so on.