Using Adobe Acrobat Security to Protect copyrighted documents

Today I learned how to access the Library at Charles Sturt University as I spotted a reading in my course outline that sounded relevant to my first assignment and that it was an ebook format so I could have it straight away through download.

I started reading and I wanted to highlight information. All the commenting tools were disabled and I noticed a padlock symbol above the normal bookmark symbol. Clicking on it, I discovered the security features you can put on PDF documents. This got me thinking about the e-resources I have in the school collection that I want students to access and use if I can make sure that they don’t make illegal copies. Here is what the security settings look like:

These are the security settings for an ebook from uni. Note commenting is turned off but copying is turned on.
These are the security settings for an ebook from uni. Note commenting is turned off but copying is turned on.

I want to do more research on these settings- I am really interested in being able to get our e-resources out to students.

Playing with an iPad

Just this week I went to a Get to know your iPad workshop at the Apple Store in Sydney. If I apply KWL (what I Know, what I Want to know, and what I Learned) this is what happened:

K- I already know what the home screen is and the home button since I own an iPhone. I already know what the iPod app is for. There was no differentiation there between people who have just turned the iPad on for the first time and those who have been playing for a while and have come to get the most out of it.

W- I wanted to know how to get rid of the ‘permanent’ apps on screen such as contacts and lock the apps in place so students cannot delete any apps. The Apple store’s ‘facilitator’ said you can’t but all the demo models on the tables had apps locked so you can’t move or delete them. I need to do more research on this.

I also wanted to learn how to add books to the iBooks app. Apparently the school iPad needs a software upgrade so that pdf ebooks can be directly downloaded from the internet

L- I have learned that you can download an app called ‘pages’ part of the iWork collection. It behaves just like Word- that would be a good app for students. I also learned that you can group apps in folders by dragging one app on top of another. You can even rename the folders eg Maths games.

I spent my travel time on the train reading a very interesting ebook ‘From the Creative Minds of 21st Century Librarians’ problem was that I could not download it directly to the iBooks app so I could not bookmark it. The book contains wonderful library lesson plans linked to the Information Literacy standards in America but those standards are very close to our own Australian Information Literacy standards.

Point is that I have been reading this ebook on the iPad. I found it very easy to read and I could change the text size from small to very big by ‘pinching’ or ‘pushing out’ the screen

 

Miss H

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