©ollectanea

I have so enjoyed my two years as the Center for Intellectual Property's Virtual Scholar, and my 20 months as your host here at Collectanea. Over these two years, I've kept an eye on and chatted about copyright matters, heard from many of you either in comments or by email, taught two courses for the Center, helped to plan and keynoted for the Center's Annual Symposium and, overall, been very, very privileged to be involved with you and your concerns and interests through the generous sponsorship of the Center. My tenure comes to an end this month and Peter Jaszi will be joining the Center as virtual scholar next year, continuing a wonderful practice that we are all so lucky the University of Maryland University College supports!

I am a contributor to two other blogs and hope that you'll read those posts from time to time if they may interest you: Free the books and The Scholar's Space, the first sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, and the second by the Texas Digital Library. My writing for Free the books focuses on the copyright issues involved in identifying public domain and orphan works. That effort stems from UT's participation in the Google Book Search project, which generates digital copies of all of the books in our Benson Latin American Collection, but it will extend to issues associated with ascertaining the copyright status of all works, not just books. The Scholar's Space focuses on open access and other issues associated with scholarly communication. And again, these issues spill out to other forms of communication. It's a web, right? Everything is connected to everything else.

I certainly wish all of you who address copyright issues in your day-to-day the very best of luck. More than that, May you have the determination, the confidence, the courage and the wisdom to meet the challenges you will face today and everyday. May you be happy!