Walking the Talk: Establishing Best Practices for Attributing and Licensing Employee-Created Works

Library employees routinely create content that is subject to copyright, ranging from web pages to video tutorials to photographs to social media posts. In most cases these contributions are invisible, as the creativity and intellectual effort of employee creators is typically unacknowledged. At the University of Guelph, we endeavoured to bring the works of employees into the spotlight by providing attribution on public-facing content whenever possible, while also facilitating downstream uses of those works through the use of open licenses. In doing so, we hoped to address a general lack of awareness and understanding of copyright and model respectful copyright practices for library employees and users alike. However, establishing and implementing these new copyright-focused practices was not without challenge and controversy. This paper – which builds upon a presentation we delivered at the 2024 ABC Copyright Conference (Martin & Versluis, 2024) – explores the obstacles we encountered in our multi-year journey to develop practices that were acceptable to content creators and content managers, while also respecting the boundaries of institutional intellectual property policies and collective agreements. Keywords: copyright literacy, staff development, copyright ownership, employee created works, library policy and documentation