About me

I advocate for issues that relate to open publishing and the future of libraries, including open access publishing, open data, user rights in the Copyright Act, the public domain, open educational resources, and privacy. As a Visiting Program Officer at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (2016-2021), I was engaged in a wide variety of policy issues, including privacy, copyright, online harms/misinformation, and more. Recent briefs and submissions to the government are available in the library advocacy section of this site.

Research in progress:

• I am part of a group that has been exploring legal considerations for how libraries in Canada can lend digital copies of books using Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Our paper – Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books in Canada – was published Dec 21, 2022.
• I am part of a group that is adapting codes of best practice for fair use to the Canadian legal context. CARL published a paper making the case for adapting the codes in 2021 and we hope to have the first code (on software preservation) completed during 2023. CARL is also working of an adaptation of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources.
• I am working on a paper with Bita Amani that discusses the role that libraries and librarians play in using and defending the rights of users of copyrighted materials in Canada. The title of this paper is “Cultivating Copyright Custodians for the Digital Age: Law, Libraries, & the Public Interest in Lending”. We presented this paper at the Copyright User Rights and Access to Justice Conference in 2017 at the University of Windsor, and the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference 2021 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York City.

Recent courses that I have taken include:

• the Creative Commons Certificate for Academic Librarians (2018),
• the Library Freedom Institute Cohort 3 (2020),
• the Fundamentals of OCAP (2021).