In line with fitting out all the classrooms at the school with data projectors and getting rid of VCRs, the library is redistributing our video collection.

Representatives from many of the departments have already come and worked out which vids they are taking and which ones we can get rid of but if you are concerned about a resource, come and get it.

Once videos have been removed from our system, they will be housed in the different departments around the school. While this is ok for the meantime, there will be less and less facilities to play them so we should be seeking to replace them in the near future.

We can just burn them to DVD, right?

As educational institutions we have special powers that allow us to show audio-visual materials to our classes but this doesn’t mean that we can automatically create copies of them.

As a library, under section 200AB of the copyright act, we are allowed to make a copy from a video to a DVD to maintain our collection if it is not available to purchase in a timely manner for a reasonable commercial price (it is a bit more complicated than that but that is generally the gist). However, in the case that we do so, we have to make and keep a written declaration that we have checked that this is the case.

In most cases it is much easier to source a new copy.

So what do we do?

The first place you should look is the ClickView Exchange. If it is there then we will all have access to it across the network by next week.

If the resource you want is not on the exchange, you can see if it, or something like it, is available on YouTube, TeacherTube or some other online source.

If neither of these options work, you can try to source the video on DVD. This might involve searching for it on the internet, contacting the video’s original suppliers or contacting the producers.

If all of these fail, this might be a special case whereby we would make an investigation and so on as above.

What then?

Once we have taken our videos off the system, we can find something more productive to do with them…