Professor Elizabeth Townsend Gard, Ph.D., J.D., joined the SISE faculty in 2013 as an extension of her real-world experiences working on an academic project with social implications. Together with her husband, Dr. Ron Gard, she formed a Tulane spin-out company, Limited Times, a research service focused on copyright law and home to the Durationator® software tool. In moving the project to product, the Gards found resources along the way, and Dr. Townsend Gard’s award of the Jill H. and Avram A. Glazer Professorship supported both her primary research and her efforts to explore ways to support lean academic startups such as their own.
The Durationator® was a software tool developed at Tulane Law School over six years, designed to make the past usable one query at a time by providing legal information regarding the copyright term of any given cultural work in any jurisdiction around the world. This knowledge facilitated efforts in mass digitization of cultural works, supported the reuse of culture, and enabled copyright holders to better understand and report the status of their works. For the first time in the new century, copyright law became accessible to anyone and everyone.
As part of her Glazer Professorship, Dr. Townsend Gard continued to develop the Durationator®, with its research arm housed at Tulane, and also explored the broader question of how to support social innovation from both legal and cultural perspectives. She and Dr. Gard planned to launch a SISE Law and Culture Information Initiative in January 2014.
Dr. Townsend Gard held the Jill H. and Avram A. Glazer Professorship from 2012 to 2018.