E-Reserve Issues

Digitization 101 has a link to a good Library Journal article on a recent disputes between UCSD and publishers over e-reserves.

In recent years, electronic course reserves have become a staple at campus libraries, large and small, public and private. But publishers, uneasy with the practice in which libraries scan portions of their collections—whether books or journals—and post them, usually on a password-protected server for a limited time, are now protesting what they claim is “tantamount to providing electronic coursepacks.”

This article is very interesting to me because I got my master degree via a distance learning program. Without electronic reserves, many materials would have been impossible for me to obtain. It would seem to me that taking away e-reserves would essentially punish distance students. With distance education rapidly growing in academia and whole programs going “online”, services like e-reserves are essential to support both faculty and students participating in distance learning.

LibraryLaw Blog has a good post on the topic. She also points out the important role that e-reserves play to distance programs and refers to the LEEP library school program at Unversity of Illinois as a good example. There are also some good comments here on the topic which discuss what a tug of war this situation truly is.

What is most ironic about this situation is the fact that publishers don’t seem to care that, for years, one of two scenerios has been occurring. Either a professor assigned a reading list and said to their students “all of these materials are available via the library go get them there” and the students came and made copies. Or libraries placed in some cases, extensive amounts of physical materials on reserve for a given course. Students would then come to the library and make copies of these materials. This is especially true for graduate level course where a substantial portion of the class materials are articles. From a logic standpoint, what’s the difference? Why shouldn’t the process and rights in traditional print environment translate into the electronic?

If publishers win a battle over e-reserves, libraries will be forced to acquire a even greater portion of their collection in digital format and simply link to these materials rather than create a digital copy. This will create an added expense if libraries choose to keep both formats. Or if libraries choose to go electronic only, make them more dependant on the publisher for content. (Publishers who many academic librarians feel are alreading squeezing libraries financially.)

Beyond this there is still the question of what happens with materials that the library doesn’t own that a professor needs to make available to students at a distance? Traditionally, a library might acquire a copy from the professor, or another library and place that material on reserve. If libraries lose a battle over e-reserves as fair use, how will they provide these materials? If libraries are forced to pay for copyright of these materials they will need larger “acquisition” budgets and more staff to handle the copyright management mess. Another potential consequence of this may be an even greater push of the open access movement, since open access materials are more “freely available.” Such a move could also limit the ability of professors to choose appropriate materials for their courses whether they be books or articles. For some courses a textbook is completely inappropriate and a selection of articles is the only way for a professor to convey the course materials. This is especially true with time sensitive topics like technology where books become rapidly out of date. I would hate to see a ruling againist e-reserves limit a professor’s ability to choose materials for his or her course.