Licensing and Managing E-Resources

by Jing Liu ~ July 28th, 2008. Filed under: Summer Institute for Chinese Studies Librariship.

Diane emphasized the importance of license as that “Contract or license is over the copyright.” The license needs to request for perpetual access, but how the vendor delivers the access may change over time. The six “terms of death” are practical:
Indemnification, Don’t indemnify a provider
Don’t take responsibility for user behavior
Unreasonable termination
Jurisdiction: governing law and venue
Disclaimer of warranty
Alteration of terms without notification

On UW’s e-resource page, Responsible Use of Electronic Resources lists Dos and Don’ts. We should have something added to our page like that at UBC.

C. Wang, asked a good question again on CNKI. Sounds like Tim has never run into this situation for Western databases. Lucky Chinese librarians! Both Diane and Tim suggest to take it up, make supervisors responsible. ERN License mapping sounds helpful too.

The practice license assignment is short with lots of bad things. No terms on course reserves, ILL or downloadingThe following sentences or points from the sample license indicate 6 terms of death accordingly

1. 3c (indemnification)

2. “Customer shall be responsible ensuring that any users accessing that applicable sites are notified of, and abide by, the terms of this license, and customer.”

3. 5b. unreasonable termination

4. 1a. which copyright law? Chinese or American? 7e, not clear

5. 3a. & 6 Disclaimer of warranty

6. alteration of terms without notification

Leave a Reply

Spam prevention powered by Akismet