Copyright Literacy Standards for Graduate Education: What We Know and What We Need

In the recent survey of Texas graduate schools (Larrison and Dickens, 20101), the majority of ETD professionals in the state indicated that copyright-related issues are the biggest continuing challenge facing institutions with ETD programs. These results should compel copyright educators on Texas campuses into action! It is time to seriously assess the copyright literacy needs of graduate school staff and students, and collaboratively develop high quality, well-advised copyright education programs to meet those needs. Campus information professionals with expertise in copyright management and information literacy have much to offer in the area of copyright education. But they lack widely-accepted standards that address what graduate school staff and students need to know, and they need the guidance on the best practices for promoting and teaching those standards. The U.S. higher education community has not yet addressed the need for campus copyright education in a coordinated, deliberate manner, leaving individual graduate programs and academic libraries to develop their own approaches of varying scope and quality. Some campuses have developed their own training sessions and guides, while others have relied on the resources provided freely by commercial interests such as ProQuest and the Copyright Clearance Center. The effectiveness and credibility of these various approaches is simply not known. To close the gap in copyright literacy standards, the presenter is working with professional colleagues to establish a standard ‘copyright curriculum’ for use with masters and doctoral students. A list of core competencies and student outcomes for graduate student copyright literacy are being developed for consideration by the Library and Graduate School communities