Hi everyone and thank you for coming out because I know how cold it is. So yeah, so Alex and I are going to talk a little bit about a project that we've been working on for quite a while and the MeePlusPlus is all about data ethics, biometrics and creating augmented reality ballet. So we've been working together since 2012. We are definitely, well I say he says we're not domain tech experts. He is. I'm not. We've done three large scale data driven dance performances before all about computer science theory and pain gateways and biometric data beforehand. We had a little bit more of a challenge due to Covid but this one because we presented back in 2018 that we were going to do this and the technology stack was very different and we had to overcome and are still overcoming some challenges. So I think yeah I just wanted to say about the tech stack thing is I'm a programmer, sure but all the stuff that we've picked up along the way we've just been doing it for the sake of the project and so suddenly you have to learn a little bit about machine learning and suddenly learning a little bit about you know inverse camera projections or whatever it is and so don't expect somebody who's really knowledgeable on stage today. We're doing this for the creativity and for you know for the performance and yeah. So one of the things that where it's actually part of my PhD research which is looking at new creative ways for raising awareness of data ethics in the computer science classrooms for trainee teachers and so data ethics is not really covered in the teaching practice. It used to be but it's no longer anymore and we look at things like the new children's code and for those of you who are interested about the theory side of it. So I have a philosophical framework that kind of draws in things like post-humanism with Karen Barad and Anushka Bailey. We also talk about Papas constructionism so he's all to do with computing and education and then if you're interested about information and the ethics of information that would be Luciano Floridi. I've treated out some stuff already they'll be coming through in the next half an hour so you'll have all of those links if you're interested in that. And then one of the things that we have here is the emotive brainwave headset. So this is a commercial headset it uses the particular one we use that you can see on the dancer here is a five channel headset whereas if you were doing it for neuroscience you'd need something like 32 channels and again they're not really designed for dancing because the amount of motion you get on the data which I'll show you in a minute is it just makes it actually unusable but it's actually great for data arts great for manipulation of data sets because it just exports to a CSV. We haven't quite fully anonymized those data sets yet in order to share with you because of the data ethics protocols of my PhD. Once Cambridge sign it off then I can share the data sets with you. So for those of you don't really know much about EEG the headset's just capturing it's a passive device that captures the electrical activity expressed in different frequencies and they use a particular algorithm called a fast Fourier transfer to actually record the raw signals and it has four main categories of signals that it does which is the beta alpha theta and delta so the beta waves are like of your conscious state and they are 14 hertz to 30 hertz alpha waves are 7 to 13 with being relaxed and calm if I have mine on now which I left at home it's right by my front door very sad it wouldn't be relaxed I can tell you that and then the theta waves which is often found in young adults we don't really necessarily see these waves the 4 to 7 hertz in adults and the data is the sort of so Delta is associated with kind of sleep so yeah so this is what it looks like when you record it and the rows represent the particular positions of the points and this is a standard called the 1020 international system of labeling all of these different points so you have a really big you know 32 48 channel headset each one of those points has a little label and that's what it's showing so hopefully it'll run so this is me in a ballet class on zoom and as you can see the motion and again I was just doing bar work but the amount of motion that you use with your head just creates massive amounts of artifacts that you don't normally get in a sort of neuroscience state and it kind of links in with the data ethic side of it of the sort of cognitive liberty which is Dr. Nita Farane's she's a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University she's done some amazing research on that whole area since 2008 and then also we don't really have any frameworks for ed tech companies to kind of take these devices into education and it's one of the things that those as educators are quite cautious of so there's a couple of frameworks that are coming out or have come out so the Australian neuroethics framework of 2019 and also then the IEEE brain initiative neuroethics framework which is probably coming out next year so for me it's really about how can we think about sharing our data when especially when young people they're so datified in the education sector they're datified from there so we're talking about Sonia Livingston's kind of work and you know every time they go into a classroom they're registered on there like whether they were there how what their behavior might be like whether they completed their homework so us as educators need to think about what who owns and what is happening with that data later on so that we can educate the students to then think about what is their personal data so this is the idea of the me plus plus there's my human self and my data self and a lot of the term we're not really aware of it and what could be done with that data I mean obviously we can go and think about the kind of real dystopian side of it let's draw that back and maybe think about how the cool things what we can do with these data sets when we're using the emotive one it just exports to a CSV which means that we can use this with the Raspberry Pi to light up some amazing lights you can actually use it to connect a stage lighting you can do data sonification I mean the world's your oyster really because it's just a CSV so I just need to go back then so one of the things that I've been playing with is how to humanize these data sets this is a really fun website and basically you type in your name and capitalizations change it you can have any particular style on that this is just actually an image and there's actually a github repo if you want to repurpose this for yourself so for my co-collaborators I'm not really going to call them participants because they inform exactly what I do and how much information that we transfer and make with the project and each one of the each one of the collaborators created their own little boring avatar and that's how I associate the data with them when I'm talking about each of the participants so feel free to have a play with that because it's quite fun and I'm going to pass over to the actual fun bit which is Alex and all of the makeup stuff that we've done and so Alex over to you yeah so thank you this is a screenshots central from open pose which does two two dimensional a recognition from two dimensional pose recognition from an rgb camera just like an ordinary webcam over there in the top left there is a screenshot from mocap net that does converts those points from 2d to 3d so they are effectively posed in a 3d space and this rather uncomfortable avatar here is us using that data to create an augmented reality model that you can watch perform and move around the stage so as part of all this we've developed quite a an unusual text act because most motion capture certainly 3d motion capture doesn't happen with an ordinary two dimensional webcam and this is a hard and new technology so this part of the regulations because of covid we couldn't actually meet in person so therefore we couldn't actually motion capture them how we would have done normally so we actually had to go we had to find a way and that took longer than expected but this is the text act so that was the reason why we didn't do it so this is just reiterating why I haven't checked my slides so yeah that's an ordinary video that is 2d points like here is my elbow here's my arm that's 3d points and that's and that's rotations so we don't store the data as points anymore points anymore when we create a an animated skeleton of the people we just store the elbows at 90 degrees 45 degrees um create a model um which is usually done in um make human and exported to blender and then we're using unities to combine all this stuff together to actually make it interactive and to be able to watch it on a mobile device um oh I have lost connection um cool um um but yeah so a lot of this is based on machine learning and using tensorflow uh so we have a lot of built-in kind of this is based around um oh thanks me cool um oh yeah so this is based around a um a set of basically it mimics how a human would recognize the you know a particular pattern so if you saw you know a set of dots like dot dot dot you'd realize that my hand you know it and they were marked as arm you'd realize it was an outstretched hand fully to the side computer doesn't have that intuition but you can train it and that's kind of the principle that we've um we um we've we've been piggybacking on in order to develop a lot of this so yeah that's um an example of inside blender um the outside is a representation it's the 3d model and the inside is what the the skeleton rotations and the animations are applied to um we use a specific model that mocap net exports um which is the cmu body and face model which is a very detailed um you can see it's got like face and hands um it's got points for all those parts of the body um much more detailed than a computer um game which is kind of what unity is expecting um so we have had to write our own custom bvh animation software um that took a long time because like I said I'm not a domain expert and so I had to learn a lot about quaternions and global versus local rotation spaces and generally blew my brain um just trying to get this all in um that's an amiga by the way the amiga is not running this um and the idea is that by running this making this in unity it can be deployed to a um a mobile phone or a tablet or something so you can see something like like this um where you are empowered to move around the scene and you can explore the ballet from whichever angle you want which adds a layer of immersion and a sort of a personal depth that you can't really experience from watching tv yeah so the challenge is is that mocap net was written by academics and not games software engineers so they don't necessarily match up so that's one of the challenges that we've come across um so we had one bit where we were testing the data and so the legs were here and then within the 3d space the torso was five miles away so there's some really funny and also some very scary test data uh we'll show you a little bit later the least scary stuff that we've created um but yeah uh it's not exactly what we wanted it to work out like so we're still working on but this is the challenge when you're dealing with trying to motion capture via basically things like zoom or or recording on your mobile phone so we tested the the video rgb data at 30 frames and 60 frames a second because dance has a lot of rotation um and you need that kind of frame rate in order to capture a lot of the data um so that hopefully these actual um as you can see definitely a duct tape process yeah you get a lot of motion blur is is the big issue and if you're you're sending a frame to basically a very simple human who has to then figure out what's going on with all that blur it's like is it going to recognize an arm maybe not so trying to keep your your capture rate as fast as possible uh means that you minimize the uh the amount of motion blur which is a bit of a consideration something else that we did which has suddenly crept in on this slide is the yolo v5 yolo is called you only look once and it's another layer of neural networks that detects objects and so we say just give us where the dancer is and cut us out um the reason for doing this is a lot of this processing is very very cpu intensive or gpu intensive and it kind of um so normally what we want to do is reduce the rgb video to a really low resolution so it can process it in a reasonable time and if you just let it do that like from your um your high resolution video capture you'll end up with like you know a few pixels on the screen which is not good when you reach the open pose stage because it just goes well i asked a few pixels um so what we do is we use yolo to extract the bit that we're interested in in the dancer and expand that out to full size before we pass it to uh open um open pose and uh you know so that can have a more optimal um resolution to work with yeah and also most of the um so most of these kind of motion tracking machine then and algorithms like open pose or or mocap.net i've been trained um not on ballet dancers who don't move in a normal traditional way um so things like trying to get ones that articulate the ankles so your feet are in the wrong position for a start. Nobody does also any of them. Nobody stands like this and the other thing is actually going up on point um so they they're not they're not trained so they assume that no matter what you're doing whether you're jumping or whatever you're always going to have your ankle flexed even maybe slightly um and then also when you jump or so today um with a ballet dancer they tend to have very straight legs and close together that's not naturally how we how we jump um so the training data tends to go okay okay oh where's the arm where's like oh there it is and so you end up with like and especially if it's above the shoulder height it's not expecting your leg to be up here um so we've had legs coming out of heads and lost arms for like you know several frames and then eventually it pops back up again somewhere um which is funny and brilliant for research but terrible for trying to create an augmented reality ballet but we'll get there in the end but yeah go ahead next slide yeah okay so this if you're uncomfortable with um sort of yeah an unusual human movement um you might want to shut your eyes for 20 seconds yeah they're not attached where they should be or in the right orientation so just warning you so the skin of the avatar was chosen by one of the performers whose whose data this is this is what they wanted to look like in the test data they didn't really want to look like this in the test data but they kind of you know the aesthetic shall we say um but yeah so as you can see it's not quite working but this is technically the um the first ballet performance displayed live on the so um so in order to as you can see this is highly complex highly technical um kind of understanding of machine learning algorithms um also requiring a lot of installed software and beyond me um but also beyond a lot of our computer science um kind of capabilities in the classroom generally uh to do with networks and maybe some of the and a lot of the programming languages might not be familiar to computer science teachers so I use something called p5.js I don't know if you've heard of that but you can edit online it's all web enabled so um and they use a machine learning algorithm called ml5 which is based on postnet um and so Alex you're gonna dance so bear with me a second um well I just get this back so here we have um a couple of the um meshes that we're going to show you live but this is never live demo should you anyway um but bear with me um I've treated these out so you should be able to have the links and I can share it later so there's one which is just face mesh so these work on mobile phones as well which is really cool um the next one is with filters and this is really talking about the me plus plus so it's got an offset of the skeleton tracking it's got a mirror of of me this is me in my ballet lessons no judgments um and then the black and white so we're using all the ideas of the filters and stuff so Alex first of all I'm just gonna um load these up um so all of this code is available um and free and there's a million and one training videos um um on the coding train takes a second obviously because they're they will work hello here we are and here's me and Alex having a chat and then I'm just gonna check yeah okay and then I'm gonna move it slowly so I can see Alex it'll take a second or two and so you can see it's picking up the dots here um um and what you can see is that it's still picking up but there's no feet and there's no full hands so for ballet that doesn't quite work but from a trainer from a teacher perspective it's a really awesome tool um and the code isn't too complicated if you used to do in JavaScript but also I've done this with people who've never looked at JavaScript before and what we do is we get you just go through and talk about sorry I need to get my stick so what we really look at are things like how the how the code function works and if you go into the nl5 site um you can actually see how they do that but the main thing that we look at is the function here and where it's you're going to and then we just look basically for the teaching perspective how we're going to actually position these on the screen is that we're just taking a circle and we're doing a fill on it and then we're drawing a line between the points which is actually how it works um don't and then we can get them to play around with a lot of the different filters as well so we're playing it so we're linking with all of those other different aspects of the computing classroom and again you can draw in um you can draw in data into these um as well so it's a really lovely platform to use because it doesn't need any installation it just runs off the web so these are the post nets if you wish to have a go yourselves and then I'll just go back to my so it's also kind of like how the open pose stage of the the main pipeline we develop works so it's a good way to sort of get into that and understand sort of how much data you can get that looks like a human being but is in two dimensions yeah so um so this has got the um x-ray threshold on it and different colors and things like that so there's different ways that you can do it so one of the challenges that we can do um either talking to you guys or in the classroom is bringing in a little bit about what is machine learning and what is ethical machine learning the fact that it makes assumptions on body types that you are actually you know you do have two arms and two legs it doesn't it's not trained on ballet um movement so therefore it's expecting very normal you know maybe running maybe a little bit of kind of like you know dab dancing whatever I mean they've done some really cool kind of breaks on stuff but it still doesn't work with the the way that our ballet dancer moves and then the challenge if you look on the kind of dystopian side is where are they using all of these facial recognitions body tracking because you've got to remember your brainwave data um or your brainwave fingerprints is unique to you the same as your gates so there are some a lot of implications in terms of the ethical kind of negative side that might be used in terms of you know the police and the military um and then obviously the deep faking driver yeah so when you've um if you're not familiar with deep faking at this point it's basically being able to represent somebody else using or represent somebody doing something they wouldn't normally be doing using an ml um platform to you know create their representation and as we're as we're doing here we're just kind of replacing a fairly ordinary looking computer model um and animating it with a natural human motion but uh it could be used to represent people in different ways and yeah I've not encountered a use for this particularly yeah this is this is a rant I'm getting this in now because I've been trying to debug stuff using some of these tools which I will not name um and because of the weird open source not quite open source academic policies some things are just you know they they published a paper they've published the results open source but you can't actually get into the process of developing your own models and things because some parts of this is kept hidden by university policy and you can go and talk to the people who developed this and they'll be like I really want to share this with you but institute policy and it is such a pain yeah that's my van over so so what we can also do with the data is data sonification so you can do this with the brainwave or you can do this with the skeleton tracking um and we use um in teaching we use um sonic pi but you can do it in python and and there's lots of different ways that you can represent the data in terms of emotion etc with that we will share the code but again the data hasn't been fully anonymized yet for us to share that with you um but it's a really nice tool I'm a massive fan of sonic pi and obviously p5.js so so yeah so just to wrap up um it's really we just wanted to share with you that actually um the things that you can do in the computing classroom you can bring in really complex subjects such as data ethics and it can be really fun in terms of how we can look at data manipulation and things like the hidden nature of of biometric data through your skeleton tracking and the fact and your beautiful brainwaves thank you very much thank you for listening


Melissa Levine, and Michigan Library. And we feel like we're going to try and have a conversation with you this morning about an initiative that we've had going for a little bit of time now. And it is a conversation that we actually started at the last CNI meeting in a virtual world. And I hope that, given that we are not huge numbers this morning, we can actually talk to you and try to answer your questions. And please feel free to even interrupt us as we go through a bit of an update on this initiative that we've had going for some time. OK, here we go. So I'm going to start off trying to bring you all up to speed by pushing us or pulling us back to really the origins of this initiative. And this idea has been percolating for many, many years. We were talking about it, in fact, last night. The initiative was born with a number of us working as faculty with OCLC in 2003. There was a little bit of leftover grant money from an IMLS digitization grant. And it was seen fit to try and teach cultural heritage professionals about how to deal with rights issues in the course of digitization. And from that, it turned into a dog and pony show. We went from one or two workshops workshops held at least four times a year for a period of four years. So we were able, because of demand, to take this little pot of money and just grow it into this experience where we went from meeting to meeting and we would hold pre-workshop meetings. And we understood that there was just such a need for education. Fast forward to 2016 and 17, we were able at Columbia to get a lyricist catalyst fund grant to determine and ascertain what need was all those years later. Were we in the same place? Were we going through the same experience over and over again trying to learn about copyright as a Copyright 101 course? And what, in fact, we learned was that we were spinning our wheels in the cultural heritage community. We were, whether library, archive, and museum, we kept on trying to learn the same subject at a very base level over and over again. And this was happening all over the country and in a very disjointed, disconnected way. In 2019, we were fortunate enough to get a Sloan Foundation grant to bring a number of people to Columbia for a two-day period in July and create a conversation about how we could try to work collaboratively to bring these disparate educators together to enable us to come up with a more systematic way of learning about the subject so that we could actually raise the conversation in the community. The idea being that we really cannot be part of change and affect change in how rights issues are dealt with in the management of our collections and in the preservation and access to our collections unless we really understood subject matter, we were in a very interesting space because we alone really understood our collections and the need, and yet we needed the Intellectual Property Foundation in order to understand how to navigate those waters. And what we didn't want was the Intellectual Property Expert community to be telling us, in fact, what we could not do. And that's exactly what the landscape was and continues to be. Then the pandemic hits and we end up in a place where everything is accelerated. We are told, for example, at Columbia, Melissa could tell you what it was like at Michigan, but we were told within a 48-hour period we were going remote. And everything was shutting down. And all of a sudden, our whole world got shifted into the digital. And so it was necessary to, in fact, try and provide some level of expertise and understanding what it really meant to all of a sudden take all these collections that we tiptoed around from a rights perspective and provide immediate access to them. What were our risks? How do we justify it? What were, in fact, the right status of all these materials that we've been preserving in a digital form but now have to provide access to them as well? And so we decided with Lyrisis that we needed to do something about it. And so from that and the discussions and the roundtable report, you can see some of the materials in front of you on the screen, we created, in a very quick form, a pilot. How do we get copyright education to library archives and museums when we're physically closed in a way that starts to make sense so that they can understand how to ascertain risk and how, more importantly, to provide lawful access so that we could actually achieve our mission even when our buildings were closed? So we created the pilot and we recruited these wonderful people to go on this journey with us and develop what was very, very quickly five courses online, which we taught, in fact, in the spring of 2021 and in the fall of 2021. So we just finished the second round. Melissa and Heather Briston from UCLA taught Copyright 101. And I have to tell you, it was this experience much like trying to sell Rolling Stones tickets. The platform, at Larissus, could only manage 300 registrants. We had waiting lists. It was out of control. And even the advanced courses received an unbelievable amount of attention. By advanced, we mean that we took this base course and said, OK, what are the issues that are really important to enable remote access to collections? What do we really need to understand? And you can see the names of the courses on your screen. And we reached out to a cohort of faculty that we knew and trusted and understood could really dive into the details and the complexities with ease so that this wasn't just a webinar with talking heads. This was an opportunity to ask questions, to bring real-life problems to copyright experts who understood the cultural heritage field. So what happened? This is our pilot. Five courses taught twice over a six-month period. So as I said, we kind of broke the platform because we educated over 1,600 people in about six to seven months. And the overwhelming registration was for Melissa's course. And it was the copyright 101. So that told us something. That told us that just the base knowledge is, in fact, lacking in a consistent way with a certain integrity. We understood that, in fact, if there is a registration fee that's nominal, it seems to be overcome because registration was pretty robust on the rest of the courses. And that, in fact, through evaluation, we understood that over 65% of those who registered for the classes wanted to be part of an online community. Where do you go for questions? The answer is to your questions. So pilot takeaways. It means that collaboration works. We have figured out that if we bring a cohort of recognized IP experts in the cultural heritage field, we're going to get registration numbers. People recognize who they are, from what institutions they come, and it's a real opportunity to learn, particularly where, if at your own institution you don't have ready access to this kind of recognized expertise. And this idea, I remember many years ago, when I worked for, in the dot-com era, I was at the Museum of Modern Art, and we were asked to create a for-profit subsidiary of art and culture. And they brought McKinsey in. And McKinsey said to us, nothing good is free. If it's free, it has to be bad. So therefore, we're going to charge you only 20% of our regular fee, because we are good, in what we do. This presumption is actually false. For our community, it is false. Free is something that removes a barrier of access to knowledge, and at the same time, provides an ease of entry to our community that is absolutely lacking. And in an environment where we are really watching our pennies and budgets are tight, even a $75 registration fee might be too much to expect from anyone wishing to learn. We learned that the courses themselves are the values in the human interaction. The value is in the Q&A. The value is in a workshop. The value is not in a recording. And the truth is that we need to make all the recordings of our sessions absent the Q&A for free and open. This is not an endeavor where we're trying to earn income. We're just simply trying to keep going. We also learned that there were, in fact, three audience. Educators need support. For those educators that are, in fact, reaching audience in a meaningful way, and I think of a colleague of ours that's on the board. This is Kyle Courtney from Harvard, who has a program called Copyright First Responders. He is one person trying to operate at scale. And he's not burnt out yet because he has an enormous amount of energy. But it really is kind of overwhelming to try and mobilize an entire country of first responders. Cultural heritage experts need the intellectual property expertise because funders are now expecting us to have it. If you apply for a grant, they want to know what your rights plan is in the course of digitization. And then finally, our audience are the institutions themselves. If you're at an institution where you can't afford Melissa or me, but you need the expertise, oh, yeah, well, I know. That's another conversation. But we could have that conversation this morning, if you wish. Really, you need to be able to train up your staff. You need your staff to have a place to go to ask questions so that you can start in housing the expertise without having to pay for additional FTE. It's the knowledge that's really important. So finally, in terms of sustainability, what we've been doing in this pilot, which we are now going to continue and launch, there's a very basic way you can provide these opportunities to ask questions and to learn. I mean, we all are at point where we've got Zoom exhaustion, but we can do this. It doesn't take an enormous amount of money to hold Zoom sessions where it's like the doctor is in. Come ask your questions. Come learn about a subject. We'll give you the quick and dirty in 30 minutes, and let's have a conversation. And then, as I said before, you don't want to create barriers of entry to knowledge. You want to make the recordings available for free. And for those sessions where we would like to do something a little more innovative, perhaps podcasts, create more learning materials and tools, if you think of my predecessor Kenny Cruz at Columbia created the copyright fair use checklist as an example of a tool, we can adopt the approach that The Guardian takes, which is pay what you can. And leave it to the community to decide at what level they wish us to play. So this is so community driven. We also recognize that we have to work with other organizations that service our community, whether it's AAM, whether it's ALA, and others to try to reach you, to try to ascertain what, in fact, are the important issues of the day, and try to work with these organizations for very targeted reasons, and to identify key partners over time. The only place where we think we are going to need significant funding is to go back to that old OCLC model where we're able to hold a couple of copyright workshops as a pre-conference experience and include the live with the online. Because as we're learning even today, there's so much more that you can learn in person. And we've certainly learned that over the course of the last almost two years. We're trying to figure out a sustainable model for this. Because right now, this is something that it's partly a passion project. It's partly, Rena didn't explain this, but both of us are lawyers by training. And we've both been in the sort of cultural heritage community for, I'd say, 30 years-ish. Let's leave it at that. And we've been working on different versions of the same problem for a really long time. And it was very striking to me to listen to Cliff's comments yesterday in our first session and how many of the things that he was talking about touched on either copyright or what we're calling copyright adjacent issues. There are issues of contract. I do think that the issues of surveillance and contracts and things like that are a next step. We need to deal with some basics first. But I personally would like to stop having the same conversation that I've been having since 1996 and have my colleagues have basic competence and basic confidence in their decision-making. To get something right or something wrong, aside from criminal intent and copyright, is really a matter of a judgment call. So what is responsible? What is mission-driven? What's aligned with the law as well as you can? Because the law isn't going to give direct instructions for much other than stop at the red light, don't stop at the red light. I don't know why. Maybe it is the intangible nature of copyright. But it seems to strike a lot of anxiety into people who are trying to make decisions. Cliff didn't use this expression of a virtual reading room, but this is an idea that Rena and I have been talking about for a long time. That language is starting to get picked up in a number of places in different ways. But this issue of being able to access special collections material remotely is only going to become more and more important. And I'm seeing my colleague Winston Tapp here. I'm reminded a couple years ago, I had the privilege of being on a panel at WIPO. And there were a number dealing with libraries, museums, and archives. And there are a number of people from places like Dominican Republic who were talking very movingly about the issues of global warming that they're dealing with, the security of their collections. And I don't think this comes as a shock to anyone in this room, but it is really strange to think about our heritage in this additionally complex kind of way. Anyway, copyright is a, I'd like to think of it as a stewardship issue, but I'd like to be able to talk about some of the harder issues. And these are mostly fundamental kinds of things. I do not know why it is so difficult, but it is. And we're trying to figure out, I think I'm rambling a bit, we really are trying to figure out how to do this at scale while we also have full-time jobs. We've thought about things like looking for a home institution. It could be something, I'm seeing Morris here, like the BTA would be an interesting possibility, clear as a possibility. There's a number of different places that have a role in facilitating collective work together. But mostly, and one of the reasons we really wanted to have this session in person was to elicit a conversation with you about business model. I also wanted to mention something about pedagogy. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. And Rina. We knew we had to take the pilot and make it relevant and real. So we appointed a new board. And we're doing this all because we're giving in kind. There is no pot of money at the end of the rainbow. We've just decided, all of us on this board, to give our time to start this conversation, to engage at the community grassroots level, and to see how it will be sustained over time. Maybe we're just going to be on Zoom and trying to answer questions for a really long time before we're taken to the next level. Or it could be that institutionally, folks come together and say, listen, we need your expertise and we can't afford to hire people. But we can't afford to give you a little bit of money to up the game. Let's see where this goes. So the new board, you'll see some names that you saw on the last list. But Jonathan Cain, who's my AUL at Columbia, has been appointed to the board. And he's a wonderful new addition to Columbia as well. Kyle Courtney is there again from Harvard. Sharon Farb, who was there from the very beginning from UCLA. Dave Hansen at Duke, who runs something called the Library Copyright Institute that is IMLS grant funded for HBCUs and community colleges in the tech triangle in North Carolina is part of our board because, in fact, his initiative is so grounded in the same vision and the same mission that, in fact, this initiative is grounded in. And then there's Melissa and myself, of course. We've added Margaret McKee, who is at the Menel in Houston, Texas. She's the digital asset manager and chairs the Intellectual Property Special Interest Group for an organization called the Museum Computer Network. Carla Myers, who does that wonderful online conference called the Library's Copyright Conference Live. She's done it online. And the budget is almost a nominal issue for the interest that the community has in creating learning opportunities. And then finally, there's Ann Young. Ann is just from the Murgies Council. She's also written much about the subject in the museum space. And she's the editor of a book that I think should be on everyone's shelf called the Rights and Reproductions Handbook. So that is our new advisory board. And that's the power of the board. And this is the piece that's so important because it is why folks registered to attend these conferences. It's because of the power of the folks that are coming together to try and bring you the education. You know, we have zero branding in the space as an entity, but this is who we are. And this is who is, in fact, giving in kind to the rest of the community to try to up the game for all of us. So next steps. We're going to launch a website in January. And we're going to try to get that information to all of you when we launch. The University of Michigan is kindly being the host for the site and seems to be a home that we're gravitating towards. And we're going to remain values driven. You know, we've heard this, I think, over and over again. There was a session yesterday where we were talking about OA presses and their space in the university press community and how, in fact, if they just shifted thinking for the press, all of a sudden the pieces started to fall into place. And so when you talk about sustainability, this is not an opportunity to make money. This is also, you know, we're lucky. We're at a point where we could deliver some very base education in a way that's not very expensive anymore. And so the idea here is let's just get the education out there and worry about the bells and whistles as we start to maybe bring in a little money to hold a pre-conference workshop somewhere. It also turns out we're not graphic designers. So maybe somebody else could pay somebody. Melissa and I are designing the website. It's been an interesting ride. It's been interesting. We have to build access to copyright education as an equity driver. So what's happening out there is schools like Michigan and Columbia can afford people like us. But what about all those other institutions that can't? And does that mean that they have less access to knowledge as a result? Are they experiencing that assessment that I've seen for so many years? Oh, it's in the copyright era. It's got to go on a lockdown laptop in the reading room. And that's it. And then, you know, release the recordings for free. This was something that was really apparent to us. Make them open. You know, CC by, let's just let them go. And I say stay human because there's nothing like learning in an interactive environment, whether online or in person. This idea of the talking heads in a webinar is just exhausting. And I would hazard a guess that we probably retain 20% of what we hear and see in a webinar. So this is our to-do list. We have to develop a communication strategy. We have to get the word out to you. You cannot build a website and they will come. That's the 1990s approach to the internet. It doesn't work. We have our immediate interest for spring is to create a couple of workshops based on the advanced subjects that we've been exploring. And, you know, we've already got the recordings that are out there. Use them as sort of pre-reads or previews before you come into a workshop so you have that kind of base knowledge. Hold online interviews with a Q&A session. Have someone who's an expert, let's say, in preservation, audio-visual preservation and copyright, interview them for 20 minutes, and then engage in a bunch of questions and answers. Identify collaborators with whom to work on key initiatives. We've been doing that. And use data and metrics. There's a colleague of ours who is doing some amazing research right now, a deep dive into data about what we know as a community concerning rights, what we need to know, who, in fact, knows it based on the positions held in our various institutions. And it really starts to drive an in-depth understanding of, in fact, where the need is greatest. So thank you for listening. And we're open to as many questions as you might have about where we're going with this next. So I wanted to add a couple things as well. It's funny when you put together a slide deck, what you're so close to your own work that you don't realize what you're not addressing. But some of the fundamental things, Rena and I both worked in and with museums and libraries. And we felt it was very important that this initiative address copyright from the convergence perspective, looking at museums, libraries, and archives. Because the copyright issues are the same. But you can have an entirely different conversation about the exact same copyright concept with someone from an art museum and someone from an archive. We attempted to pair, try to have two speakers for each of the five, the programs that we did. And we tried to pair people with different sort of perspectives. So Heather, my colleague at UCLA, who was my partner, she works in the library, but she's an archivist. And so that in planning our session, that helped us flesh things out. The other thing we did was, and I'm entirely guilty of this, when I start a basic copyright 101 talk, I talk about United States code, Section 17, and go into the law and the structure of the law. And when we practiced our initial script with Rena and my other colleagues, they're like, that is the most boring thing I ever heard. And it doesn't engage. So we stepped back and tried to design a pedagogy that's really much more about what are the problems you're trying to solve? What's the activity that you're trying to do? And we focused much, almost not at all, on the structure of the law. That could be something else, but it's not as helpful and it's not as engaging as the storytelling hook for problem solving. We used things like legal cases without discussing them as cases, but we treated them as scenarios for explaining how you might or might not approach something. So the convergence piece, I think, is a very important point. I will say, this is my sense of the comments that we got, is that people in each of these three fields think they're all very, very different from each other, which is interesting. Let's see. Well, it tells us that there's less understanding of the issues if everyone thinks their issues are very distinct, because you only start to really understand the crossover when, in fact, you really start to understand the legal issues in a more in-depth way. For so many of us that work in institutions that have these robust, very varied collections, I mean, the word libraries at Columbia is a misnomer because we have archival collections, we have object-based collections, we have it all, and at the same time, there's one copyright person, and I'm seeing the similarities right across the line. And in that first study, our consultant, Kristen Kelly, who undertook the study for us, which was funded by Lyrisis, she said, oh, this is same, same, but different. It's same, same, but different. Do you have any questions? And also, is this being recorded for...? It is, okay, so you do need to use the mic. Sorry, Mimi, go ahead. That's okay. So, I like what you're saying, and I agree, this question of the audiences and the level of distinction between the different audiences. And I really like the approach of moving to a storytelling model in terms of reaching out to, certainly, the librarians and archivists that I work with, I can see how that sort of running through Section 17 is... It's the most exciting. But the audience, the other audience that is out there is that sort of is the lawyers, right? It's the general counsel layer. At some point, we can have a lot of conversations within the libraries. At some point, it all is going to have to go to that general counsel layer, and you're gonna have to be able to put it back into the languages, into the language of, well, this is fair use, and here's my fair use analysis. So, I wonder about how we effectively integrate that into the conversation. One of the things that we talk about more informally, like woven into these sessions, is how do you talk to your general counsel? And frequently, the general counsel, in many universities, there are people who have dealt with real estate. We have many universities today, do have people who have copyright expertise, certainly privacy, increasingly, but sometimes there's nobody, and this copyright is like this other thing that you guys can figure out. So, we didn't do this formally, we did it sort of intuitively, is how do you talk to your general counsel? Because I think there's another layer of network where the general counsels are all talking to each other at their professional meetings about what's okay, like what are you doing, what are we doing? And they're using different language. Well, and there's different risk thresholds for different universities for all kinds of reasons. And so, there's not going to be, I don't think one set of outcomes, like Rena and I, and I would say this is true for the philosophy of our group. We're not expecting there to be like one approach for everyone, just that there are ways of making informed decisions. And frequently, I think with lawyers, they can read the law and get the fabric of that piece quickly. What they don't know is what you're trying to do and why they may have, there's still this like libraries are just books, right? Or why do we need libraries? We have Google. There's still like those are gaps that we need to fill without being patronizing really. No. For lawyers so that they can be better supports for us. So that's something we've talked about a lot, but we haven't done it, we haven't like put it as an intentional thing. Maybe we should. I think it should be a workshop. How do you deal with your general counsel? And you know, some counsel want you to tell them what the section is. If you're dealing with a fair use case, here's my four factor analysis as they said. And some don't. Some want to hear the facts. And you have to read your general counsel to understand it. So what we have to give you in terms of education is you need to understand that there's a four factor analysis on what the four factors are. And this is the section. And these can be your complications, but the complications are so dependent on facts that we need to get you to a productive space with your counsel so that the counsel's response is not no, which is everyone's concerned, right?   And you don't want to be there. No. Thank you. So I was glad, because Mimi touched on the general counsel piece, which was right at the top of my list is, you know, how do we address them and manage them in some ways, right? Because yes, and I think the other aspects where that I've seen an area of expertise is contracts, right? And are they, you know, which can be helpful because I was glad Melissa mentioned that. I feel like that's a whole other area that we need to deal with as a profession that it's actually one of the greatest risks we face as a profession, because we are doing all kinds of license agreements all over the place. And very few of us have a granular understanding of what's in them. Do you have a filing system? Let's start with that. That's good, okay. Yeah. Not a given. No, exactly. One, that's it. And you know, is there paper files that are digital file, all of those things? I think just wanted to make the point and they're same, same, different. That there are state implications, particularly for state institutions. Sure, that's already on your radar, but just to put it on the record, so to speak. And then, less a question than a suggestion that I feel like, as is true in so many cases, DEI work has a model here that could be useful. I'm thinking particularly of an organization called Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity, I don't know if you're familiar with this model, but they do onsite in-person workshops with the intent that everybody who attends will then hold an onsite in-person workshop at their home institution, right? That's part of the commitment of attending the workshop. And part of the commitment is that the workshop will be open to the broader community, not just people at that institution. And so the focus is building and spreading a culture of awareness around the issues that are relevant to that community. And I feel like maybe it's too touchy-feely for general counsels, I don't know, but you might be able to get people attending and participating in these things. It's also an opportunity because institutions that can afford to send people for a week-long in-person conference then can support institutions in the area that can't send people. So that's another piece going to the principle of equity underline your value. So I just suggest that as a potential model for scaling your efforts. Thank you. Those are really good suggestions because scalability is one of our main objectives here, right? I know that Kyle in his work with Copyright First Responders has now started to take it to the second level where he's holding the trainers session where then he seeds the knowledge regionally or locally. And the idea then is that those folks take over the conversation in their area. Again, it's his need to scale being a person of one that's trying to do this. But it is all going to be community-driven. I mean, we as a board want to seed this and then see how far we can push it and then see if technology can assist us in trying to get there, too. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. I have a couple of comments and then a question. So I want to pick up on the advisory board and particularly one of the points about general counsel. Some of us are very fortunate to have general counsels who really get it and who are not risk averse. And I think tipping into that group and finding someone to augment the board would be very important. I would also say something I've learned based on my international experiences is that we know that many librarians also operate archives and think of themselves as being in one universe, as Melissa mentioned. But we also know that archivists think of themselves often very differently from libraries. So I would suggest, again, on the advisory board to have someone who identifies explicitly as an archivist. But my question is that it's a very interesting presentation about what you're talking about, but it's really focused on what is and not what ought to be. So of course, my question is, is there an advocacy role for changing the what is as part of the goal here? It's interesting you would ask that. So ultimately, we've had this debate. We had this debate during the pilot. And we're continuing to have this debate. And so is our mission ultimately advocacy or is our mission education? And I'm going to argue that it's the same thing, because we can't advocate for change what ought to be until we have the knowledge requisite in the community to come up with very interesting solutions. We need a sandbox. But in order to get in the sandbox, we need the tools and the toys to build the castle. And we're not there yet. And this is what's so frustrating for so many of us who've been working in this field for so long. It's back to that same conversation over and over again. The faces change. The issues don't. And that's what's just the driver for this. So we're saying education first, but the purpose ultimately is to affect change. The other issue that's so interesting in trying to bring these three sectors together. Museums are in a place where they can't hard lobby because of taxation reasons. They're very fixed in their perspective concerning this. So we have to, in order to accommodate, channel ourselves accordingly. But that doesn't mean that we can't have relationships with advocacy organizations. And I think that is the necessary piece. Can we be the education arm, you know, or at least one of them? There's so much growth in the advocacy space because there is so much frustration. And I think we're formally trying to deal with the information and education piece because it allows, it's not, nothing's neutral. But if there's the framing of neutrality that lets us hopefully have more conversations. Does anyone have any more questions? Does anybody want coffee? Well, thank you very much for coming. And please don't hesitate to approach either of us if you didn't want to ask your questions in more. Unrecorded. Yeah, general forum and unrecorded forum and we hope to get the launch information to you as quickly as we possibly can. Thank you. Thank you.


how to make the best of the work that we do together, is there's some significant things that I notice that people do and that is they actually are ready. They have very little resistance, if any, and are really ready to make some of the changes. So if you're not really ready to give up the patterns, I'm probably not the person for you. But if you really are ready to give up the patterns, then we'll work very quickly, deeply, efficiently and effectively to get to where we need to get to. And being able to understand that resistance has come up for a reason, because sometimes we have secondary gain on why it is that we're doing what we're doing. The secondary gain can be simple things like if I give that person up in my life, then I'm also going to give up all the fun that I have with them. I'm going to give up the money. I'm going to give up all these other attributes that make you feel as though you're actually negotiating yourself out of your own power. And that is a significant thing to be able to come with into yourself and to be able to deal with on your own. Of course, I can help with that, but that is an inward journey. People that are successful in this work come ready to work. They come with a notebook or I record the sessions and listening back to the sessions is like having another session all over again. And that's an opportunity to be able to get so much more because when we're in the midst of the session, you are processing all of the things that you're saying or not saying and the things that I'm saying. And all of these things that are happening in the course of the hour and a half or two hours that we're together, that is meaningful information to go back and get. And so I oftentimes hear from people, wow, I didn't get that the first time around and listening back to the session was really helpful. So if you come ready to work, I'll be right there ready to work with you.