Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The University of Florida’s Florida Free Culture Group has a meeting coming up soon, on Monday, December 8 at 7pm in the Reitz Union (room 288). I know this isn’t that soon, but the Assistant Director for the Digital Library Center Stephanie Haas will be speaking (and maybe with others, maybe me!) and at this point in the semester everything books up quickly so it really is approaching soon for anyone taking or teaching classes. I hope to be there!

UF’s Florida Free Culture student group will be having it’s first meeting of the semester on Monday, October 13, at 7:00 pm in Reitz Union 288. FFC is an organization that advocates for copyright law reform, the use of open source software, and fights for your rights online. Free food will be provided! For more information about FFC, see their website: http://uf.freeculture.org/.

While I can’t make this meeting, I’d recommend it to anyone who can. FFC is a great advocacy group to promote awareness and as a ways for finding the means to do needed work. Copyright law reform is desperately needed, as is a greater awareness of copyright (many academic authors have their rights returned to them for published books and they often aren’t even aware of it; academic authors often have the right to put their pre-prints on their website or in their institutional repository), and greater awareness of the costs of free culture (“free as in freedom, not free beer”) and greater advocacy is also needed to develop support for the much cheaper and more beneficial free culture as opposed to proprietary, closed, and expensive systems that hold too much information right now.