Course Reserves Request Form
What are Course Reserves?
Course reserves items are supplemental class materials provided by the library as requested by faculty. There are two types:
- Print/Physical course reserves = Books, videos, and other physical materials that are placed at the library circulation desk for 4hr loans.
- Electronic course reserves = Course materials made available in an electronic format. Electronic course reserves are to be posted to a secure system (such as Moodle) as class reading.
- Please be aware that we may not be able to fulfill requests for full length ebooks and evideos as not all electronic materials can be purchased and licensed for library use (authentication for multiple users/users with permanent file hosting, etc.).
- For items that are already 'online' in the library catalog such as ebooks, evideos, and articles from ejournals, instructors can simply provide students the link in Moodle.
Request Guidelines
- Use the Course Reserve Request Form to submit your requests. Please prepare to submit print and electronic items in separate fields. A prefilled submission form is available via your course page under the Instructor Menu (at the top gray area > To-Do List at the left).
- For electronic requests that require scanning, please make sure you have reviewed the Copyright and Fair Use Considerations section below (scanning is usually limited to 1 chapter/section or 10% of a book, with some exceptions).
- Provide the library with your course reserves before providing them to your students. This allows us to retrieve items for course reserves before they are borrowed by students, necessitating a recall.
- Allow at least 2 weeks for processing course reserve requests.
- For print materials, items will be listed in the course page and course reserve list once it is available for students. For electronic course reserves, instructors will receive an email with the file or location to post to Moodle.
- Course reserves are made available for one semester. All requests must be submitted again semester by semester, in accordance with fair use practice.
Copyright and Fair Use Considerations for Reproduction
The US copyright law (United States Code, Title 17) is an intellectual property law intended to protect a creator and their original work(s). The Fair Use doctrine provides limited uses of copyrighted works with consideration of four factors:
- Purpose: The purpose and character of use.
- Nature: The nature of the copyrighted work.
- Amount: The amount or substantiality of the portion used
- Effect: The effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the work
A rule of thumb is 1 chapter/article or 10% of a title, however, more or less can be supported based on the evaluation of the four factors. Since instructors are best know how certain course materials support their courses, it is up to instructors to gauge whether certain materials fall within fair use. Columbia University has a very good overview and a checklist to determine whether the item you want to use falls within fair use. For example, where a large portion of a book is to be used for class, but it is out of print/cannot be purchased and there was a good faith effort to contact the publisher or author to check for permissions, the 1st and 4th factors lend themselves to providing access to a more substantial portion of the work.
