Tonight’s class session focused in large measure on the topic of licensing and the role it plays in selecting and acquiring electronic resources for libraries. As part of that discussion, and as a result also of the assigned readings, I came up with four unofficial principles or truths for licensing in libraries:

• Licenses represent a restriction of copyright law.
• Licenses intrinsically favor publishers/vendors over libraries.
• Just about everything in a license is negotiable.
• (I can’t remember, frankly, if this was the fourth one or not.) Licenses are ubiquitous.

Thinking about this a bit further, I suppose there could also be a fifth principle about licensing and libraries: librarians as a whole do not pay close enough attention to licenses.

Nothing startlingly brilliant or new about these observations, of course, but I thought it worthwhile to note them here.