2000 COPYRIGHT
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HEADLINE: Speakers' Biographical Sketches

Copyright Confusion? Community Guides

Kathe Albrecht
Kathe Hicks Albrecht is the visual resources curator for the Department of Art and Art History at the American University in Washington, D.C. For the past several years, Ms. Albrecht has been actively involved in issues surrounding the use of digital image information and its impact on the educational community. She chairs the Visual Resources Association Intellectual Property Rights Committee, which recently developed the Image Collection Guidelines under discussion today. Ms. Albrecht represented VRA at the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) and she is active in several working groups of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). Ms. Albrecht has also been involved in several hands-on digital imaging initiatives. Recently, she served as one of three project coordinators for the American University's implementation of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL). At the University she develops and maintains web pages of digital information for art history courses. Ms. Albrecht has spoken and published broadly on various aspects of the educational use of digital information, including distance education and the analog to digital transition. Ms. Albrecht holds degrees in art history from the University of California Los Angeles and the American University.

Robert Baron
Robert A. Baron is an independent art historian and consultant specializing in museum and art historical information studies, in automated museum collection management systems and in computerized scholarly cataloging. Currently he is the subject specialist for the Academic Image Cooperative, a program sponsored by the College Art Association and the Digital Library Federation. In addition, he publishes and arranges conference sessions in the field of intellectual property in the fine arts (see his website), chairing or co-chairing NINCH Town Meetings at Toronto (1998), Los Angeles (1999), and New York (2000). For Visual Resources, Robert Baron edited a special double issue on copyright and fair use (Copyright and Fair Use: The Great Image Debate), (Vol. XII, No. 3/4). His edition of the papers presented at the NINCH-Kress town Meetings in Portland, Oregon and Toronto is being edited for publication. He is current chair of the Committee on Intellectual Property of the College Art Association, and in that capacity has co-authored the CAA position paper on Distance Education legislation and is preparing the CAA guidebook on copyright for artists and art historians. His latest paper, excerpts from his web-site version, is titled "From Romance to Ritual: Mona Lisa Images for the Modern World," Visual Resources, Vol. XV, No. 2 (1999). Robert Baron's paper will be posted after the Town Meeting at his web site at http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron

Michael Shapiro
Michael S. Shapiro, formerly General Counsel of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is in private law practice and serves as a consultant to companies and cultural organizations in the United States and around the world. In addition to serving as General Counsel of the International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), Dr. Shapiro serves as the General Counsel and Chief Executive Officer of the newly established Illustrators' Partnership of America.

As a member of the adjunct faculty of George Mason University, Dr. Shapiro teaches "Global Intellectual Property Rights and International Trade" and "Culture and International Transactions" within the International Commerce and Policy program. Under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Dr. Shapiro recently completed an expert mission to Cairo, Egypt to assist the Egyptian Museum, Islamic Museum, and Coptic Museum in ongoing digital cultural heritage projects.

Dr. Shapiro has written extensively and lectured widely on a broad range of legal and cultural topics. He is the co-author of A Museum Guide to Copyright and Trademark (American Association of Museums, 1999), the editor and a contributing author to The Museum: A Reference Guide (1990), a contributing author to International Intellectual Property: the European Community and Eastern Europe (1992), and the author of Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (1983). He is currently working on a book on the law of visual communication. Dr. Shapiro earned the Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and the JD from the George Washington University Law School.

Barry Szczesny
Barry G. Szczesny, Esq. is Government Affairs Counsel and Assistant Director in the Government and Public Affairs Department at the American Association of Museums. There he is primarily responsible for monitoring Federal legislative and regulatory developments and advancing the interests of museums with regard to education, intellectual property, technology, and nonprofit postal and tax issues. Prior to joining the AAM staff in May 1996, he was Legislative Associate for the American Arts Alliance advocating at the Federal level on behalf of performing, presenting, and exhibiting arts organizations. In 1991, he was an Arts Administration Fellow in the Office of General Counsel at the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Szczesny has made presentations on a variety of legal and legislative topics at numerous conferences, including the American Law Institute &endash; American Bar Association's Legal Problems of Museum Administration. Mr. Szczesny earned his bachelor's degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1989 and his law degree from Wayne State University in 1992. He is a member of the State Bar of Michigan.

Diane M. Zorich
Diane M. Zorich is an information management consultant for cultural heritage organizations. She specializes in organizing and managing cultural information, with an emphasis on providing and accessing this information over digital networks. Her introduction to intellectual property issues and cultural information began in 1997 when she conducted cross-disciplinary research on intellectual property management organizations and published the results in a book entitled Introduction to Managing Digital Assets: Options for Cultural and Educational Organizations (The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1999). Most recently she has served as project management consultant for the American Association of Museum's "Museums and Intellectual Property" program, coordinating the efforts that went into the creation and production of its publication, A Museum Guide to Copyright and Trademark.

Prior to establishing her consultancy, Ms. Zorich was Data Manager at the Association of Systematics Collections in Washington, D.C., and Documentation Manager at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. She served as past President and Board Member of the Museum Computer Network, and is current Board Member of the Media and Technology Standing Professional Committee of American Association of Museums. She holds graduate degrees in anthropology and museum studies from New York University, and currently is based in Princeton, NJ.