“Fair Use” and Dance Research: Dance Heritage Coalition Panel

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Session 12	“Fair Use” and Dance Research: Dance Heritage Coalition Panel
	Elizabeth Aldrich, Barbara Drazin, Peter Jaszi, and Libby Smigel
	Using “Fair Use” to Free Archival Resources: Dance Heritage Coalition’s Project to Increase Access to Dance Collections – a roundtable and discussion
	Using “Fair Use” to Free Archival Resources: Dance Heritage Coalition’s Project to Increase Access to Dance Collections – a roundtable and discussion This Interactive Roundtable presents the findings of the Dance Heritage Coalition’s “fair use” project, whose outcomes will make dance-related materials at libraries, museums, and archives more readily accessible to researchers, students, and the public. Strict copyright observance affects the breadth of materials available for scholarly study, public programming, and classroom use. Thus, copyrights adversely skew the dialogue in historical and cultural studies of dance. The panelists from the archival, scholarly, and legal fields will illustrate the copyright problem and the ‘fair use” solution by offering several case scenarios (including curatorial problems in the DHC traveling “Dance Treasures” exhibition). The DHC’s initiative is modeled on the documentary filmmakers' project on “fair use.” Through individual interviews and focus groups of librarians/archivists, tech staff who work with librarians, and scholars/educators, the DHC developed a set of scenarios where copyrights conflict with the programs and missions of dance-related cultural institutions. Findings and agreements will be collected and shared, including a draft of a “Statement of Best Practices of Fair Use.” Q&A to follow.

	Elizabeth Aldrich was named dance curator of the Music Division, Library of Congress, in 2006, after having served as executive director of the Dance Heritage Coalition. She is internationally known for her work in period dance, and she has provided choreography for nine feature films, including The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day, Washington Square, and The Haunted Mansion. Aldrich is the author of “Documentation, Preservation, and Access: Ensuring a Future for Dance’s Legacy,” in Teaching Dance Studies (2005); From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance (1991); “Introduction,” International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998); among other works.

	Barbara Drazin MA, Dance Heritage Coalition executive director, served as curator of the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore and as museum program officer at the Institute of Museum Services (now the Institute of Museum and Library Services) among other positions before joining the DHC in 2002. She has also held positions as interim school director and education assistant for the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and as education coordinator and registrar at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Working with co-curators Lynn Garafola and Norton Owen, she coordinated preparations (including copyright clearances) and traveling arrangements for the DHC traveling exhibition “America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.”

	Peter Jaszi JD, is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law at the Washington College of Law, American University. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. Jaszi advised and facilitated the successful “fair use” project for documentary filmmakers in 2005, and he recently completed a report on best practices in “fair use” for online video. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (with M. Woodmansee, Duke UP, 1994). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, 3d ed. (Matthew Bender, 1994), among other works.

	Libby Smigel MFA PhD, Dance Heritage Coalition project director and faculty member of George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, heads the DHC “fair use” project among other initiatives. With Vanessa L. Jackson of Coppin State University, she is currently co-authoring and co-editing a two-volume series for Greenwood Press titled Icons of American Dance. She acts as Area Chair for Dance and Culture for the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, and she reviews manuscripts for the Journal of American Culture and for Dance Chronicle.
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