> curious to know what exactly is meant by "However, there now seems to be a crackdown looming on the horizon as it relates to fair usage,".



If copyright holders had their way, libraries as we know them would cease to exist. The corporate owners of knowledge would prefer that ALL access to that knowledge be re-configured to the 'course-pack' model -- generating a fee paid for every user, at each point of access. If the publisher can demand payment from the library every time they put material on e-reserve -- whether the library owns the hard copy or not -- then why can't the publisher demand payment every time someone checks out the book? This is not speculation: publishers trade associations have actually advanced this sort of thing. Until fairly recently, courts and legislatures had been going exclusively the way of the 'owners' of 'intellectual property' and libraries were cowed by their power, agreeing to abide by ludicrously narrow definitions of Fair Use (the CONFU guidelines). Of the course the publishers kept pushing, looking for increasing opportunities to 'monetize' their holdings. 



However, the last five years or so have seen a reversal of this trend, thanks to the work of the Center for Social Media and Lawrence Lessig among others, and to rank-and-file librarians finally being pushed to far by these sorts of proposals to the point where they've stopped kissing the publishers' shoes. 



I'm not sure whether Darrel was referring to the residue of this last campaign to expand corporate control over intellectual practice, or whether there is some new effort to get things back to CONFU-like terms. But we can assume that there will always be a push for more control, more payments etc., and that if librarians organize and work with information activists the demands can be effectively resisted. 



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