Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

Faculty and students sometimes advise each other to upload articles downloaded from library-licensed databases into AI tools for summarization, or for study purposes, such as generating study questions and dialogs about the materials. These are not public domain articles that happened to be indexed in a library database.

Many of our faculty have access to ChatGPT EDU, which creates a "walled garden" around the files, preventing them from being used for AI training and treating them as institutional data. However, our students do not yet have access to the EDU account. In addition, many students and faculty are experimenting widely with other free AI tools on the Internet and are most likely uploading all types of files. I realize we cannot stop all of this, but if we have a statement to let library patrons know the proper uses, we are hopefully at least covering our obligations here.

Could you suggest a reasonable policy statement that libraries could publicize to their patrons regarding this issue to help ensure that patrons respect author and publisher rights and that libraries will not end up in legal trouble down the road?

Under what circumstances could faculty face personal liability if they wrongly accuse a student of breaching academic integrity through AI use? Would liability primarily arise under defamation, negligence, or contract/tort law (e.g., duty of care to students)? Would the institution’s liability insurance typically cover individual faculty in these cases?

Periodically, our library receives handwritten requests for information from individuals who are incarcerated at prisons and correctional facilities around the country.

We are an academic library at a private institution and our campus does not currently have a prison outreach program. As part of our ongoing social justice efforts within the library, we would like to be more purposeful about the way we handle these reference questions.

What are legal considerations we should keep in mind when providing reference services to incarcerated individuals? Ideally, we would want to treat these questions the same way we would questions from members of the general public. However, our team wants to be sure we understand whether there are ways we could unintentionally put ourselves or our institution at legal risk if we provide information that is somehow deemed problematic.

(Note: We are aware of the Prison Library Support Network and plan to participate in trainings they may offer.)
Thanks!

Recently a question has come up at our academic library concerning patron privacy and the notification to a patron (usually a student) concerning excessive downloading of content from databases in our collection. Our current practice has been to receive notification from the vendor about perceived illegal downloading. We then ask a member of our library IT team to investigate the situation, based on the information from the vendor. The contact information acquired by that IT staff member is then provided to the e-resource librarian. That librarian then contacts the individual via email, explaining the situation and indicating that such behavior must cease. Once that is done, the librarian notifies the vendor that the situation has been addressed, and there is no need to withhold access to the product from the campus. No personal identification of the user or student is provided to the vendor, nor distributed to anyone else. The question now: Is this process appropriate in resolving the misuse of a database, or does it violate the user’s/student’s privacy rights?

ResearchGate is often a place individuals will go to snag PDFs which are typically provided by authors, not publishers. It refers to itself as a community and network for researchers to share and discuss their research with others from around the globe. ResearchGate explicitly states that they are not liable for any copyright infringement, and that the responsibility rests with the individual; it is entirely up to the individual to either post the PDF to be downloaded freely, or to send the PDF to individuals upon request.

I have multiple questions surrounding the use of ResearchGate. Number one, should libraries be directing individuals to ResearchGate to ask authors for copies of their articles? Number two, should our document delivery service be providing copies of PDFs from ResearchGate to our library patrons? I am personally very hesitant to refer anyone to ResearchGate as I find most faculty researchers are not aware of who truly holds the copyright to their published articles. Thank you!