Copyright matters!

It’s not just a nice thing. It’s not just a cute idea, that schools can choose to follow or not.

Copyright is FEDERAL LAW.

And violating federal law can be an extremely big problem.

As library people, we are often the ones who are responsible for guiding the rest of our colleagues across our parent organization in following the best copyright practices. So you very much want to make sure you are following copyright law.

The Houston Independent School District – the seventh largest school district in the country – just faced having to pay a $9.2 million judgement awarded in federal court.

Yes, that’s $9.2 MILLION DOLLARS.

Don’t let your school be the next headline for violating copyright laws!

Check out this excerpt below, from the Houston Chronicle, and click here to get the full story.

“In the winter of 2013, when the principal of Houston ISD’s Westside High School suggested making copies of colorful study guides recently purchased from a small Austin-area company, an English teacher responded that there was a “glaring disclaimer about copyright” at the bottom of the documents.

The teacher suggested the guides, which cost nearly $2,000 total, should be handed out during class and picked up before the final bell. But when the school’s principal brushed aside the copyright concerns, the teacher fell in line…

…The guide’s creator, DynaStudy, got the last laugh on Thursday, when a federal jury awarded the company $9.2-million after finding dozens of HISD employees repeatedly violated federal copyright laws pertaining to the guides. Jurors sided with DynaStudy on all counts following a seven-day trial, validating allegations that HISD staffers cropped out the company’s logo, hid copyright violation warnings and widely distributed the manipulated study guides to colleagues throughout the district….

…Lawyers for the district offered multiple defenses for employees’ actions throughout the lawsuit: Staffers were not aware of copyright violations; educators engaged in “fair use” of reproduced copyrighted work; improperly published material was immediately removed from the Internet; and DynaStudy provided inaccurate information when seeking federal copyrights.

However, jurors found HISD employees violated copyright laws hundreds of times over a decade, improperly using 36 study guides created by DynaStudy. In its lawsuit, the company described various methods of skirting copyright rules, often validating the claims with email exchanges or Internet postings made by employees.”

Yay! We’ve survived another big year, and are ready for summer!!

Join us this week in celebrating books that take place during the summer. You can read these yourself, add them to your TBR pile, or use them in a display in your library!

We’ll be back in the fall with all kinds of other great Book Bouquets. And stay tuned to us this summer, where we may drop an occasional Bouquet of books for your reading pleasure!

As always, the links to books below will take you to Amazon.com. If you buy a book, or anything else, while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits. Thanks in advance!! (We really appreciate the money, and need it way more than Jeff Bezos does!)

The Vacationers, by Emma Straub “For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

This is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build each other up again, and the bonds that ultimately hold us together. With wry humor and tremendous heart, Emma Straub delivers a richly satisfying story of a family in the midst of a maelstrom of change, emerging irrevocably altered yet whole. “

A Hundred Summers, by Beatriz Williams “Lily Dane has returned to Seaview, Rhode Island, where her family has summered for generations. It’s an escape not only from New York’s social scene but from a heartbreak that still haunts her. Here, among the seaside community that has embraced her since childhood, she finds comfort in the familiar rituals of summer.
 
But this summer is different. Budgie and Nick Greenwald—Lily’s former best friend and former fiancé—have arrived, too, and Seaview’s elite are abuzz. Under Budgie’s glamorous influence, Lily is seduced into a complicated web of renewed friendship and dangerous longing.
 
As a cataclysmic hurricane churns north through the Atlantic, and uneasy secrets slowly reveal themselves, Lily and Nick must confront an emotional storm that will change their worlds forever…”

Becoming Strangers, by Louise Dean “After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking their last, as illness and incompatibility bring their unhappy union to an end. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match for the well-worn patterns of domestic life. Then the couples’ paths cross, and a series of surprises ensues – a disappearance and an assault – but also a tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings, and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to come to terms with what’s been keeping them apart. “

Skios, by Michael Frayn ” On the sunlit Greek island of Skios, the Fred Toppler Foundation’s annual lecture is to be given by Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-famous authority on the scientific organisation of science. He turns out to be surprisingly young and charming — not at all the intimidating figure they had been expecting. The Foundation’s guests are soon eating out of his hand. So, even sooner, is Nikki, the attractive and efficient organiser.

Meanwhile, in a remote villa at the other end of the island, Nikki’s old school-friend Georgie waits for the notorious chancer she has rashly agreed to go on holiday with, and who has only too characteristically failed to turn up. Trapped in the villa with her, by an unfortunate chain of misadventure, is a balding old gent called Dr Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper and increasingly all normal sense of reality — everything he possesses apart from the flyblown text of a well-travelled lecture on the scientific organisation of science… “

Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury “Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.”

Outline, by Rachel Cusk “Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.”

You know it.

We know it.

Library people are the neatest people around. No question!

And CMLE is filled with them!

With more than 300 library organizations across our membership area, we have a lot of interesting people. And we know you don’t always get a chance to chat with each other in person.

So we set up a variety of different member events across the year – we have something for everyone!

Coming up the last weekend in June, we will meet up at Lake Maria State Park. You are invited – and invited to bring a friend, spouse, or kids.

We will be relaxed, no big plans. It’s really just a chance to hang out, enjoy some nature, and chat with each other.

• You can come down for the day on Saturday
• We will have scheduled times to chat on Saturday at 11:00 and 2:00
• You can stay overnight with us Friday, Saturday, or both
• You can hike the trails, explore the Visitor’s Center, admire the nature all around you
• Your kids can run around and scream
• We will have s’mores Friday and Saturday nights (probably for overnight campers, but anyone is welcome to one!)

Is this the right member event for you?

• If you have wanted to try out camping, but didn’t want to try it alone.
• Or if you are an experience camper.
• Or if you just like to see nature, trees, and even some nice trail.
• If you have kids with lots of energy, who would like to do some running, yelling, and exploring.

This is the adventure for you!

RSVP to us at admin @ cmle.org, and tell us what library you are with, and how many people are in your party.

War changed my life, before I was ever born.

I am, of course, not alone in this – tens millions of people across the planet are caught up in wars not of their making, not of their choosing, not of their fighting. We are bystanders to it all, and yet our lives are forever altered.

And we are the forgotten witnesses to what war really means.

The impact of war goes well beyond chickenhawk politicians braying for war – and the money and attention and votes it brings to them. It goes beyond a entrenched military industrial complex that funnels billions of dollars to a few big corporations. It goes beyond even the flag-covered coffins of soldiers returned home, photos of which were banned from being shown for many years and which still tend to be hidden from view.

Today is Memorial Day.

It’s the day set aside to remember the soldiers who died serving in the military. It gives everyone an opportunity to take a moment to give a much-deserved thank you and remembrance of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have died in service to their country. This is indeed the best way to commemorate the day.

(Don’t save your thanks to vets for just Veteran’s Day either. Give to the USO, and other organizations, and show tangible thanks and support!)

But this day also makes me furious. All I see is the enormous waste – of life, of potential, of money, of every possibility that could have happened and didn’t. Because someone, somewhere – maybe with great information and with the best of intentions, but probably not (I’ve read too much history to not be cynical on this) – decided it was okay to ruin lives.

Dead is easy. Dead is done. Everyone has their own thoughts on death; but in this context – it’s over. 58,202 American soldiers died in Vietnam. Their stories, their possibilities, the good things they could have contributed to society – it’s over. Their families and friends are allowed to mourn them, and try to get on with their lives as well as they can. We will never replace the empty spots they should have been there to fill. The contributions are gone forever.

But most people in wars don’t die. They go on. And their war follows them forever. And it connects to everyone around them. And it never lets go. And life for everyone around them is changed forever.

My dad was like a lot of rural kids growing up on a farm: a lot of hard work, no extra money, not a lot of opportunity floating around for anyone. And my grandmother was like a lot of immigrant moms: she wanted better things for her son. She wanted him to go to college, to get an education, and to have a good life. So she helped to push him there, and he was able to go to college. It took money that nobody had; so he sold his cows, he worked assorted jobs, and he joined ROTC. He graduated, got married to my mom, and four months later went to war in Vietnam.

He came home with a lot of medals for all kinds of things, and with scars physical and mental. He doesn’t talk a lot about it. When we were kids, he would tell us about how much he liked chocolate chip cookies in MREs, and would trade hand grenades for them. It was just enough information to let us know things were scary, but not so much that we would be too scared. We saw pictures of him standing at an orphanage, with kids swimming in a bomb crater filled with water. He told us about forging signatures (Donald Duck, I believe) to get supplies there. He showed us pictures of four of his South Vietnamese colleagues visiting us in Colorado in 1969. They got to hold his baby (me!), and they got to have the unusual experience of snowball fights high in the Rocky Mountains. When we asked what happened next, he just briefly said “They are probably all dead,” and changed the subject.

We know our members, especially in schools, are using ELM resources and are big fans. We are also big fans!!

And now there is a new URL: elibrarymn.org . Lots of new features and resources are in there as well, so check it out and be sure to share that with your teachers and students.

Here is an excerpt from “The new ELM portal is here!” by Carla Pfahl. Click through that link to get all the info!

“The new ELM portal is now live and accessible via the new url, elibrarymn.org. The purpose of the new portal was to reduce the number of clicks it took to get to needed resources. Keeping the focus for the portal as a discovery tool helped achieve that goal. We have retained many of the well-used features from the old portal in the new environment such as Find a Publication, Topic Search, and the Grade Level break out of appropriate databases (under the Student Research button).

As mentioned in an earlier post, we have updated the entire ELM portfolio as well. We have a new name, eLibraryMN (same abbreviation), that reflects modern-day language and is in line with the naming scheme of other Minitex programs, a new logo, and new color palette.

Support for elm4you
We will continue to support the old ELM portal through this school year to allow for as little disruption as possible. The new url, elibrarymn.org, will direct to the new portal and the link, elm4you.org, will point to the old portal. On the old portal we will have a button to Try out the New Portal!

Database Links
If you have links on your website to ELM resources via elm4you.org, please note that we have changed the domain and URL used to access them. The resources have a new URL beginning with “https://content.elibrarymn.org” – if you have any questions about this change or need assistance updating your links, please contact us! We have created a guide that explains linking here.

Featured Resources
We can now highlight various resources in our suite by tagging them as a Featured Resource. This will allow us to identify popular as well as lesser-used resources for people to try out and explore a little deeper than they may otherwise.

ELM Learning Center
We have completely overhauled the ELM Learning Center with information for librarians supporting access to ELM resources. The database guides and tutorials have been updated as well. “