Join C4C for a Special Event at Trinity College Library in Dublin

C4C is excited to join Irish and European Parliamentarians, civil servants and the Irish library community for a special event at the esteemed Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland on 17th January 2012.

The theme of the event will be “Libraries, Archives and the Information Revolution: How to Square the Circle of ©”.

Everybody has been to events where you leave without hearing anything new, or where discussions centre on arcane points of law or philosophical concepts. This event will be refreshingly different and focus on the practical needs of those who make our cultural heritage available to future generations: How do they preserve creative works, what do they need to be able to do it, and what obstacles do they face?

There will be no presentations, no jargon and no legalese – just a discussion with renowned experts from the European Commission and the library and the academic community including Yvo Volman, Toby Bainton, Susan Schreibmann and Georgina Bentliff, on the practical challenges libraries and research institutions face in the digital age. The presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion between the invited guests on how Irish and European copyright could better facilitate the needs of libraries in ways that benefit everyone. Each table will be balanced to ensure different stakeholders are represented so table discussions will be lively and illuminating. First, however, we will start with a private tour of the library’s treasures, including sections of the Book of Kells – one of the most famous illuminated manuscripts in existence. A few other examples of what our guests may see on the tour are:

Selected artifacts from the library’s large Louis XIV collection
A rare first edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy
Trinity’s digital imaging studio and conservation laboratory – where you will see how the library digitizes its collection

While the European Commission proposed a new Directive on Orphan Works earlier this year, Ireland is in the midst of reviewing its copyright legislation. Our event comes at a key moment, as the discussions on these important issues enter into a decisive stage. The lunch will be sponsored by the Computer & Communications Industry Association ( www.ccianet.org) with the friendly support of the Trinity College Library. Please contact us at info@https://coalition4creativity.org for further information about this event.

Speakers’ bios

Toby Bainton spent the first part of his career working in university libraries, most recently as the director of the library of the University of Reading (60 km west of London). He then became (1995-2010) the chief executive of the association of UK and Irish university librarians, SCONUL. He is now senior policy adviser for Information Sans Frontieres, a group which works to promote favourable laws and policies for cultural institutions, especially in the European Parliament, the Commission, and the Council of Ministers.

Georgina Bentliff currently works as a publishing and copyright consultant and was the License Development Director at the Copyright Licensing Agency in London until April 2011. Prior to that, she had various roles in the academic and medical publishing sectors where she worked for more than two decades. As the representative of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency in its work to include Irish publications in ARROW, Georgina Bentliff brings an understanding of the European initiatives to address the Orphan Works problem including ARROW Plus, the pan-European registry project.

Yvo VOLMAN is Deputy Head of the “Access to information” unit, DG Information Society and Media, European Commission, Brussels. Mr Volman has been a European Commission official since 1998. He works in the Directorate General for Information Policy. He is currently occupied with public sector information and, in particular, strategic issues related to digital content. For ten years before that he was a policy advisor in the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, first in the area of International Technology Policy and later in the field of Industrial and Technological Policy Planning. Mr Volman has a Ph.D in European Law, obtained after seven years of study at the Universities of Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Florence.