00:00 Opening

The National Library provides lots of great resources that educators and students can use from published text to original letters to antique photographs. A lot of these materials are available for free and can be downloaded straight from our website or Trove, but once you want to use these materials or access other materials in our collections things can become more complex.

As with many things in both the library and the education spaces, a large part of this complexity comes down to copyright. Luckily a lot of good tools exist within Australian's copyright system to make it easier for us as Librarians to supply material to you and for you and your students to make use of that material.

In this video I'll aim to answer some of the most common questions we get from Educators about copyright in the Library's collections.

00:54: Notice of legal advice

Hi, I'm Jessica Coats from Rights Management at the National Library of Australia. Before we get started today, I would like to acknowledge Australia's First Nations peoples, the first Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and give respect to their Elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

01:19: Can my students use material from the Library's collection for their assignments?

Yes, student use of Library material will usually be covered by the copyright fair dealing exception for research and study. This includes copying material for research or including in an assignment and applies whether students are on site at the library or using our website. The use has to be fair and it has to be for the purpose of research or study so uses outside of students' personal research or assignment work might not be covered by this exception.

We'll talk more about this below. For more of an explanation of fair dealing see our previous copyright video or the Australian Copyright Council's website which provides good general information about copyright in Australia.

02:03: Can I use Library material in teaching resources and classroom presentations?

Use of copyright material by you as a teacher within your classroom, for example when presented to your class, is also covered by a specific exception in the Copyright Act as is including material in exams. Other educational uses, such as worksheets or course packs, will usually be covered by the educational statutory license which I'm sure you're familiar with. The best source of information about the license and how copyright works for educators in Australia is the Smartcopying website. This is a wonderful website put together by the National Copyright Unit, the advisory body on copyright for schools and TAFEs and has lots of great fact sheets to help you work out what you can and can't do. If you're at a university, your university copyright officer should be able to help you.

02:55: What if we want to use material outside the educational environment?

Sometimes you might want material that can be used outside a strictly educational environment. For example, if you want published material in a textbook or if a student wants to submit a film they created to a competition or festival. This kind of use won't be covered by the fair dealing for research and study or the education exceptions. It could be covered by another exception in the Copyright Act but this can be very case-specific. For example, using a clipping from a newspaper in a funding video might be okay as parody and satire but you might need permission to use the same material in a serious documentary. Where there's any doubt, an easy solution is to focus either on material that is out of copyright, usually because the creator died more than 70 years ago, or on material that is under a Creative Commons license. If you're not familiar with Creative Commons, it's a global licensing system that allows rights holders to share their materials with others providing permission in advance for certain uses. It's popular in both the cultural and education sectors and can provide you with literally millions of creative works from art to music to whole textbooks that can be freely and legally reused. Find out more about Creative Commons at creativecommons.org.

You can find out of copyright and Creative Commons materials easily on Trove by using the rights field in our advanced search tools. If you select 'free' in this field, your search results will be limited to materials that can be used without any further permission. Many of these materials can even be downloaded directly from Trove and used immediately.

04:43: Can the Library send me material?

If the material you or your students want to use hasn't been digitised or isn't available on Trove, we can still often send you a copy. The Copyright Act has several exceptions that allow libraries to supply material to remote users. These exceptions can cover both published and unpublished materials and can even include complete copies of material that isn't commercially available, though there will usually be a cost recovery fee. If a person needs that material for a different format, for instance because they have a disability, the library can also legally adapt it for them. An important caveat, though, is that some materials may have restrictions on them that prevent remote supply. For example, rarer materials such as manuscript collections, might be subject to a license agreement that restricts access for a period of time such as the life of the author. Access to materials may also be restricted, like privacy or if they contain indigenous cultural intellectual property.

When we do supply material, we will usually ask you to comply with a few conditions of use, like respecting the moral rights of the creator. You will have to credit them whenever you use the material and you mustn't treat the material in a derogatory way. These are legal requirements under the Copyright Act and cannot be waived.

06:07: How do I know if something is restricted?

If you found something you want to use in our collection, its catalogue record can tell you a lot about whether and how it is available. If the material is from our special collections, such as a manuscript or a picture, the catalogue record will include an access conditions node which can tell you if it is available for reference or is restricted. It can also be useful to check the copyright status tab on the bottom of the catalogue record. This uses our copyright calculator to determine whether the material is still in copyright and for how long. The status is based on an algorithm and may not always be totally accurate. For instance, if there is limited information about the material, so you shouldn't rely on it as a legal advice, but it will give you a good idea whether the material is free to use. If the material is digitized, you can also find the same information on the NLA digital copy and the Trove entry for the material. If, after checking the catalogue record, and the copyright status you're still unsure about possible restrictions on the materials, you can also use our Ask a Librarian service to ask for more details.

07:30: What if I need permission?

When you put in a request for material, we will tell you if you need permission to access or copy it. You may also need permission for downstream uses, like publishing the material or using it in a performance where those uses aren't covered by copyright exceptions. Unfortunately, the library can't provide you with this permission for most of its collection. While the Library owns physical copies of the materials in its collection, it doesn't own the rights for most of them save for a few special collections where the copyright has been gifted to the Library but this is the exception rather than the rule. This means that even where we have the right to supply the material to you under the Copyright Act, we can't always do so and we can't give you permission for other uses. If you do need permission for access or if you need it for a downstream use, such as publication, it will usually be up to you to contact the rights holder yourself.

One exception to this rule is oral histories where the library has agreed to contact rights holders on behalf of users. For all other materials, we will help you as much as we can with the contact information we have for rights holders.

08:38: Where should I start?

The best place to start to find Library resources you can use is to go straight to the national collection hub, Trove. On its front page you'll find lots of ways to explore not just the National Library collection but the collections of hundreds of other libraries, archives, galleries and museums across Australia. If you have something specific you are looking for, you can search for it in our online catalogue. It will link you through to the digital copy if it exists or you can ask us to send it to you using the request a copy tab. Don't forget to check the access conditions and copyright status for restrictions. For more help, there are a number of information resources available on our website or you can send a question to Ask a Librarian. Finally, if you have a school library, they should always be able to help you find material or your local public library can also help.

That covers the main questions we get from educators. To find out more about using material in the Library's collection, go to our website: Copyright in library collections. You can find it via the copyright Link at the bottom of each page of our website. There are also some great resources on Australian copyright law online. As I said earlier, the first place for an educator to go to understand copyright in Australia is the Smartcopying website. To understand more about what libraries can do to help you, we recommend the resources provided by the Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition, or for more general copyright information there is the Australian Copyright Council. And if you're looking for material that can be used freely and legally, Creative Commons is a great place to start.

10:32: Conclusion

Thanks so much for joining me today to find out more about how educators can best make use of our national collections. An important part of the Library's role is to make sure all Australians can access and use our material and knowing how to navigate copyright is an important part of that. If you do have any questions or are just not quite sure about copyright in our collection, please get in touch and we'll do what we can to help you out.