Dr. Sherman Barr, associate professor of social work at New York University and chairman of the social-welfare programs and policies curriculum at the university's School of Social Work, died last Friday at St. Vincent's Hospital. He was 57 years old and lived in Manhattan.

Dr. Barr had been a faculty member for 14 years and previously had been director of the Neighborhood Service Center program of Mobilization for Youth, an organization that combats juvenile delinquency. He was born in New York City, graduated from Brooklyn College and received a master's degree and a doctorate from the Columbia University School of Social Work.

He recently had received the 1982 Great Teacher Award of the N.Y.U. Alumni Federation. He is survived by his wife, Elinor; two sons, David and Daniel, and a daughter, Rachel, all of New York City.

'Nine major publishers announced yesterday that they had dropped their case against New York University and eight of its professors who they said had violated Federal copyright laws by improperly photocopying material for classroom use.

In exchange, the university agreed to certain guidelines governing the duplication of copyright works and to monitor compliance by the faculty.

Lawyers for the publishers, which included Random House, Simon & Schuster and Houghton Mifflin, said the settlement with the country's largest private university could set a precedent and help curb what they said were widespread violations of Federal copyright laws. They threatened further legal action should such practices continue at N.Y.U. or elsewhere.

Association Financed Suit

''The publishers are hopeful the principles reached in this agreement will be taken to heart by other colleges and universities, and by faculties and administrators alike,'' said Jon A. Baumgarten, who represented the Association of American Publishers, which financed the suit. ''If our hopes are unfounded, we will take appropriate action.''

'We're not out to hang faculty members from a lamppost and cut out all photocopying,'' he said. ''The assumption is not that photocopying should be stopped but that the rights of copyright owners should be respected.''

The guidelines restrict teachers who want to use multiple copies of copyright materials in the classroom, and are based on the length of the excerpts copied. They do not apply to individual students making occasional copies for their own use.

Similar provisions have already been adopted voluntarily by Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities. The suit, which was filed last December in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused the defendants of ''engaging in the unauthorized and unlawful reproduction, anthologizing, distribution and sale of the publisher's copyrighted work.''

Andrew Schaffer, N.Y.U.'s general counsel, acknowledged that the university would have to compensate various publishers for duplicated materials in the future. But he denied that the agreement would necessarily lead to higher costs for students or that it would curb the traditional discretion of professors to design their courses.

''This agreement does not in any way, shape or form restrict faculty members' choices of curriculum materials,'' he said. ''What will change is that, in many instances where photocopying was previously done, the prior permission of the publisher will be required.

'We're hopeful that this will enable faculty members to understand in a much more specific and practical way what is permitted and not permitted under the copyright laws.'' Standards for 'Fair Use'

The guidelines agreed to by N.Y.U. were originally negotiated by authors, educators and publishers, and were contained in the report accompanying the 1976 Copyright Act. Together, they define minimal standards for the ''fair use'' of copyright material.

Under these guidelines, for instance, teachers can, subject to some limitations, make multiple copies of complete poems of fewer than 250 words, as well as of complete articles, stories or essays of fewer than 2,500 words, without permission. They are also free to copy excerpts - of 1,000 words or 10 percent of the total text, which ever is less - of longer works.

Where a professor determines that photocopying is explicitly barred by the guidelines, the agreement continues, permission must be sought from the publisher. The professor seeking such authorization must specify the exact material to be used, the number of copies to be made and the use planned for the duplicated materials.

In some circumstances, according to a policy statement contained in the settlement agreement, the fair-use doctrine could permit photocopying beyond that allowed under the guidelines. When a faculty member believes he has been unreasonably denied permission to duplicate materials, he must seek authorization from the university's general counsel. Only those following such procedures will be defended by the university in any subsequent suits. 'Full and Prompt Inquiry'

The agreement obliges N.Y.U. to ''act diligently and in good faith to foster compliance'' with the new policy, as well as to make ''full and prompt inquiry'' into possible violations and to take ''appropriate action'' where wrongdoing is discovered.

The university also pledged to distribute copies of the new policy to its faculty and to post notices at all university copying facilities.

The other publishers in the lawsuit were Addison Wesley, Alfred A. Knopf, Basic Books, Little Brown, Macmillan and the National Association of Social Workers. The N.Y.U. professors named as defendants were Martin Hamburger, Phyllis Mervis, Thelma B. Chesney, Terri Schultz, Robert Sklar, J. Rosen, Stuart Johnson, Robert Sharp and William G. Simon. A ninth professor named in the original suit, Sherman Barr, died recently.

The publishers' case against the Unique Copy Center, situated near the N.Y.U. campus, was unaffected by the settlement.

SARAH SCHULMAN: Okay, so we just start by your saying your name, your age, today’s date, and where we are.

DAVID BARR: I’m David Barr; I’m 51. It’s May 15, 2007. And we’re in my apartment in New York.

SS: On Second Avenue –

DB: On Second Avenue and 12th Street.

SS: Where you’ve been since 1979.

DB: Where I’ve lived since 1979.

SS: A true New Yorker. And full disclosure; your father and my mother worked together at Jewish Board.

DB: Oh –

SS: Sherman Barr, yes.

DB: Yeah. It was a long, long time ago, then.

SS: Yes. So you’re a real New Yorker, New Yorker, New Yorker?

DB: I’m a third-generation native.

SS: Native New Yorker. What neighborhood did you grow up in?

DB: In Brooklyn; in Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach.

SS: And did you go to Brighton, which high school did you –

DB: I went to John Dewey High School, an experiment in public education.

SS: And did it work for you?

DB: Oh yeah. Yeah. I was –

SS: So you grew up in one of those Jewish socially oriented families.

DB: Very much so, yeah.

SS: And do you think that you were trained to be a community activist by your family?

DB: Yes.

SS: How did they do it?

DB: They took me on demonstrations from when I was a young kid. I went on, I remember going to — and it’s a really long answer, but –

SS: Go for it.

DB: – I was taken on demonstrations to integrate housing in Brooklyn; to ban-the-bomb demonstrations in the early ’60s. I was a part of, my parents helped to organize a volunteer reversed busing program in Brooklyn in the ’60s, where all these sort of white, middle class kids from Brooklyn were bused to a predominantly black and Latino elementary school in Fort Greene, which was a very different neighborhood than it is now. So I was involved in that, and it was a very high profile program, so there was a lot of press involved, and like I remember all that. And then a lot of antiwar, anti–Vietnam War activity in junior high and high school.

SS: How left were your parents?

DB: My mother was thrown out of Erasmus High School for distributing socialist literature. And my father was a member of the Welfare Rights Movement and started Mobilization for Youth on the Lower East Side.

SS: So were they ever Party members, or –

DB: No, they were never, no, so I’m a pink diaper –

SS: Okay. So like solid liberal background.

DB: Nn-, by liberal, liberal would be a sneer to liberal. It would be definitely be more left than that.

SS: Like socialists –

DB: Yeah.

SS: Yeah. But your mother never belonged to a party, or –

DB: No.

SS: No.

DB: She belonged, I guess before, as a teenager, she was a member of the Socialist Party, or the Young Socialist Group.

SS: Oh, the Trotskyites, or something like that?

DB: I don’t, now you’re getting into –

SS: Now I don’t know.

DB: – yeah.

SS: Okay. But anyway, it’s been in the family for a long time.

DB: Yeah, yeah.

SS: And do you remember them explaining to you why it was important to show up for social change, or –

DB: Um – yeah. It’s sort of most of what we talked about, I guess. It was like that was the discussion in the house. That and food. And just, stopping the kids from fighting with each other. I went to a radical, leftist summer camp. It was a real –

SS: What was that called?

DB: It was called Camp Thoreau. And it was, it was in New Paltz, outside of New Paltz, and it was – the Rosenberg kids were there; the Robeson kids were there. It was an interesting place to be in the ’60s, in terms of the kids that were there, the counselors that were, what the counselors were doing when they weren’t at camp and stuff like that.

SS: So what were the first movements that you participated in?

DB: I started a group called Children’s Strike for Peace, in junior high school

SS: Wow.

DB: In like seventh grade.

SS: And what did you guys do?

DB: Nothing. We went, we went to, I don’t know; what did we do? We, we – I guess we participated in demonstrations, you know. Because I, I remember going to most of the major Vietnam War demonstrations, and volunteering at the – the office was on 17th Street, off of 5th Avenue, and it was like the Mobilization to End the War; I guess that was the name of it. And I would go and volunteer there, and – yeah.

SS: So what do you think your vision was for what your life was going to be like, when you were coming out of high school, at that time?

DB: I got really interested in theater. I got interested in avant garde environmental group theater, because of, there was some program at the high school that I got involved in, where we did this very sort of experimental, communal theater piece.

And I was taken to see the Performance Group in what was going to become SoHo. And saw their piece called Commune. And it really changed my life. I really said, oh, this is what I want to do. And so I got involved in doing that kind of work. And went to theater

school at NYU when I got out of high school; moved into the city.

SS: Oh, I never knew that. So who did you study with, or who did you work with?

DB: Well, first I studied with Stella Adler in this program there, and I really hated the program. She was a – very entertaining, but a pain in the ass. But then I got involved with the Performance Group, and I left school to go work with them for a while. And the guy who started, there was a guy in The Performance Group named Steve Borst who started a gay and lesbian theater group – and this was 1972, 1973; three, maybe. So it was probably the first gay and lesbian theater group, ever. And I was 18, and I left college so I could be a part of that. And we created a piece called Slime Mourning. Which was, oddly, about death and sort of how gay and lesbian people relate to rituals of death in society, which was kind of odd, that we, that was our focus, given what was to come. And Ron Vawter was a member of the group, because he was the business manager of the Performance Group, and good friends with Steve, and that was sort of how he started acting