These activities allow them to experiment with cutting-edge teaching technologies, which provides them with the skills they will need to become the education professionals of tomorrow. The diversity of information resources presented by students in their assignments will be compared with the output of classes that have not received instruction via WebCT and which have only had a traditional one-class period session on the library and information resources. The WebCT logs will be analyzed to measure how frequently each text and multimedia resource on the site has been accessed by the students. The frequency at which the students e-mailed librarians and participated in threaded discussions moderated by librarians will also be measured.2 A crucial role of the library in the Learning Links project is to assist teaching faculty and instructors with copyright issues. With the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Law in 1998, dealing with copyrights in the digital environment has become even more complex and confusing.
Librarians can provide leadership in the use of copyrighted materials online.
For the Learning Links project, librarians and instructors have held several meetings to discuss copyrights and fair use issues. The more we limit the size of excerpted texts, video and music, the more likely it is to be a case of fair use. At the end of these discussions, librarians and instructors have agreed on the following points. First, it is important to take advantage of WebCT's built-in password protection, which ensures that access to Learning Links is limited to students taking the class. Second, in the primary phase of the project, Learning Links is considered a one-year experiment, thus the use of copyrighted materials is considered spontaneous and fair use.