reserves, moodle and fair use
- April 12, 2010 @ 3:13pmwoslumb says:I have a fairly confusing (at least to me) question.
I am a reserves specialist at The Evergreen State College, and as part of my duties, I assist faculty by scanning in items (chapters/articles) for them to post on their moodle sites. I am fairly cautious about copyright and fair use guidelines (we have no official copyright librarian, so I have taken it on) but have been instructed to keep our limits flexible (around 18% of a work max.) however this sometimes seems to be too much, but not enough for faculty.
currently, I have been scanning in chapters from a book (an in print sociology text book) but once I reached our max. limit, I instructed the faculty that I cannot scan in any more from that particular book (in fact, rejecting some of the submitted chapters because it would be clear violation). The faculty then returned later with a photocopy of the rejected chapter to be placed on closed reserve for her class.
My question is, should I count this as a separate item since it's being placed on closed reserve, or part of the whole rejected work?
Thanks,
Barry - April 13, 2010 @ 12:53pmJanetCroft says:Limits for physical reserve are not as important as for electronic -- whole works can be placed on physical reserve with no copyright concerns whatsoever. And thay can be treated totally separately from electronic reserves for the same item. So a solution might be to put the whole book on physical reserve, then just put a chapter at a time on electronic reserve as needed. -- this semester. If you need to do it again next semester, then you should write to the publisher for permission.
- June 16, 2011 @ 12:39pmwilliamsonl says:Barry,
I personally would consider the copy on physical reserve the same as the electronic. Whichever way you use it, you are still making copies of an item that you feel exceeds fair use limit. A copy is a copy. It does seem to me that putting the book on reserve would be a solution--if they can come in and look at the chapter copy, they should be able to come and look at the original textbook. Don't think taking chapters up and down one at a time is a solution either--still copying more than a comfortable amount of the textbook for one semester for one class. And by putting up each chapter of a textbook, it seems to be pretty clear that there would be no reason for a student to purchase a book that they can access for free--a factor clearly against fair use that definitely affects the market.
Posting to the forum is only available to users who are logged in.