Electronic Reserves System

Roger Brisson

Pattee Library

Pennsylvania State University

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/rob1

SPEC on Electronic Reserves at ARL Web Site: http://www.arl.org/transform/eres/eres.html

Electronic Reserves Clearinghouse (Columbia University): http://www.columbia.edu/~rosedale/#Sites

What are electronic reserves ("E-Reserves" or "ERS")?

Automated library system to provide digital access to instructional materials via the World Wide Web.

Materials are accessible 24 hours a day.

Available to students from workstations at the library, computer labs, dorms, university offices or can be accessed from home.

System includes exams, lecture notes, journal articles, a chapter or chapters from primary texts, images, course syllabi and assignments.

The Web site is organized by course number, with links to the full-text versions of the material.

In order to access the material for course(s) one must use an access account and an Internet browser.

Professors submit their copy lists online via a Web form that includes all pertinent information like course number, source of the texts, etc., and students are notified that the course texts are available via the ERS Web site.

Background: How did ERS develop?

It is an combination of two well-known and established practices:

1) the 'copypack' system of course text preparation, and

2) the Reserve Reading Room of university libraries. A key to the success of E-Reserves is that users could readily orient themselves in the new environment to familiar practices.

Copypacks

Copypacks have been heavily used in instruction for at least 15 years.

Professors submit their copying order to the copy shop, indicating the course number and a list of articles to copy.

The copy shop resolves copyright clearance issues, copies the material, and binds with covers it into a book-like package.

Reserve Reading Room (Seminarapparat)

Located in the main library on campus, and are restricted reading areas. Materials in this department do not circulate.

Professors submit the course reserve readings for the semester, and the library takes the necessary books from the open stacks and puts them into the Reserve Reading Room.

Material reserved can be jounal articles, chapters from books, assignments, tests, or professor's own notes.

For heavily used material from general courses there is a possibility to put them on 'permanent reserve.'

Students must go to Reserve Reading Room and use the material there, and they understandably make heavy use of the photocopy machines.

The Move to E-Reserves

)Dissatisfaction: neither students nor professors like the Reserve Reading system.

Students must come to the library to use or copy the material.

Managing the system on the part of the library is tedious and staff-intensive.

Dissatisfaction with Copypacks

Likewise, students and professors have become very dissatisfied with developments in the copypack industry.

In part because of copyright licensing increases prices for copy packs have risen significantly in recent years, with the cost of $30-40 per copypack becoming standard.

Campus Camputing Infrastructure

Developed enough for digital resources to become a formal part of instruction. Most students have their own Web-capable PCs, and universities now have fast, robust campus-wide networking systems with remote access from home.

Large computing labs of over 400 PCs are now common.

Both students and professors are rapidly developing the skills to work in the online environment. Universities like Penn State have developed extensive online resources for setting up their PCs and learning to use the campus Internet infrastructure.

All students at Penn State automatically receive an email account (Eudora) and their own Web space upon enrolling at the university. Penn State now has over 70,000 email accounts.

The Shift to E-Reserves

Has been relatively easy because students and professors can readily identify its structure from copypacks and the Reserve Reading Room.

To develop the ERS, the library only needed to shift some its staff from their standard responibilities in the Reserve Reading Room.

Today there is one professional librarian, a manager, and several staff members running the ERS. It runs off of an Alpha server, and three Pentiums are used to add material and maintain the system. The department has a high-end 30 bit color scanner with ADF. OmniPage Pro is used for OCR work.

The Situation Today

Until faculty learned more about the ERS, development was rather slow.

Because of general dissatisfaction, and because of concerted publicity on the part of the library, faculty quickly caught on and it is currently undergoing rapid growth.

Demand doubled over the past summer.

To lighten the burden on staff, the library is now suggesting to professors to scan their own materials for their classes, or to download it from online databases (though this is not a requirement).

Libraries are now working with publishers to provide libraries their books and journals in electronic form, so that they can be more easily integrated into ERS.

Copyright Issues

Fair Use Guidelines for Electronic Reserves Systems, now in their third draft, and approaching their final form .

ARL is an important partner in this, and an increasing number of institutions are developing individual standards of practice.

Current Practice

Copyright for ERS: The first semester that we make a single digital copy of a article, book chapter, etc. it is under fair use. If the material is is used again it is sent to bibliographic information to Business Services, who in turn obtain copyright permission.

The library who pays the copyright fees.