Four years of the CoOL SIG
By Jane Secker, Associate Professor in Educational Development and co-chair of the ALT Copyright and Online Learning SIG
This post is written by Jane Secker, Associate Professor in Educational Development and co-chair of the ALT Copyright and Online Learning SIG. Jane reflects on the work of the CoOL SIG over the past 4 years and how their group aims to help build more confidence in copyright matters in the learning technology community.
The ALT CoOL SIG was created around 4 years ago, largely on the back of the Copyright and Online Learning webinar series that Chris Morrison and I started during the Covid-19 pandemic. The webinars were an attempt to support the community during a difficult time where institutions had pivoted to online learning and were grappling with many challenges. As copyright was our area of expertise, we hoped that we might share our knowledge to at least help reassure people that with all the scary stuff going on, copyright shouldn’t be a barrier to education continuing. After nearly a year of running the webinars, ALT suggested we set up a special interest group and the CoOL SIG was born.
Our group acts as a community of practice to share knowledge about copyright. Much of the copyright expertise lies in the library community, so we are an open group and delighted to have learning technologists and librarians as members, as well as copyright specialists. we have been really pleased to see the ongoing interest in attending our webinars – last Friday we ran our 77th webinar! And this was the 5th edition of a series of webinars we’ve done called ‘Becoming a Copyright Specialist’ where people in our field share their stories about why they got interested in copyright and insights from their work. It was great to be joined by Christine Daoutis, UCL, Irene Barranco-Gracia (Imperial) and my colleague Kathryn Drumm (City St George’s) who is an educational technologist and also Secretary of the CoOL SIG. Kathryn’s talk may be of particular interest to learning technologists as she explained how she doesn’t view herself as a copyright specialist, but has enough knowledge to support academic colleagues and also embed some copyright literacy into the training she offers. We record all our webinars, so if you’ve ever missed one you can catch up on the ALT YouTube channel and last Friday’s was no exception and is available online.
Beyond the webinars, the CoOL SIG committee meet 4 times a year online and have a wide range of interests, with sub-groups looking at topics such as Copyright and Accessibility and also copyright education. However, the other event the group supports, is the Icepops conference. While this conference was founded by Chris and I in 2017, we do try and make our work sustainable and we now have support from the CILIP Information Literacy Group and ALT to enable this one day event to take place at as low a cost as possible. We find online meetings and webinars are fine, but copyright folks love to get together and share their passion, and also have a bit of a party too! This year Icepops 2025 will be taking place at the University of Manchester John Rylands Research Institute and Library from 9-10 September in what we call a ‘Pocket Edition’ format. This means, it’s a half day event, but if you want to extend your stay we have an evening social and tours.
Our keynote speaker will be Monica Westin, Associate Director, Content and Discovery, Library and Cultural Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. Monica has held roles at Google and the Internet Archive and we know she will provide some fascinating insights into the interesting times we are living through. We will also be joined by Mat Bancroft, Curator at the British Pop Archive, John Rylands Research Institute and Library.
The call for papers is now open until Monday 9th June and the conference theme is “Copyright, safe spaces and sanctuary” with the following sub-themes:
· Reflection, empathy and emotion
· Long term thinking and planning for the future
· Building and supporting communities
· Supporting and nurturing others
· Finding joy in your work
We are always keen to have new members involved in the CoOL SIG, and you can sign up for mailing list and receive our the regular newsletter that our Comms team put together. We share topical ‘copyright news’ and it ensures you never miss a webinar! I really enjoy being the co-chair of this group and over the past 5 years I’ve really enjoyed seeing how a copyright community of practice works in practice. There is always more to do, and I’m looking forward to presenting some findings from recent research that Chris and I conducted with Amanda Wakaruk, on ‘Copyright Anxiety’ and how it impacts on higher education. That’s the topic of our next webinar scheduled for the 13th June at 3pm. I hope to see you there.