hi >I'm working on a presentation, and I'd like to have a footer with a >copyright notice and page number (if there's room).
You need to adjust the outer theme of the beamer presentation. You might almost get what you want by adding \useoutertheme[footline=authorinstitute]{miniframes} to the preamble To get pagenumbers I think you need to make your own outertheme. You could copy and rename the miniframes and add \insertpagenumber to the theme. For more info read the beamerguide where all this is explained, however, with 250 pages it is a bit daunting :). Ingar Pareliussen