Copyright Literacy of Cultural Heritage Workers in the Czech Republic with a Focus on Librarians

Memory institutions try to balance authors' rights and "public good" in making information accessible. Cultural heritage workers must have sufficient copyright literacy to deal with challenges growing from these conflicting interests. Todorova initiated international research describing copyright competencies and attitudes of cultural heritage workers. This study transfers it to the Czech Republic. We got 313 responses from all types of memory institutions. Respondents evaluated their copyright literacy rather positively (especially in a national context), but almost half of them had some knowledge shortcomings in copyright exceptions for cultural heritage institutions. They preferred web pages as information resources about copyright. 74.3% of respondents thought that institutional copyright policy was necessary, but only 22.4% of the institutions had a special worker assigned to deal with the copyright agenda. Most respondents felt that copyright literacy education was necessary both at the university level and further professional education.