Using online reserve as an alternative to print means that students do not have to compete for access to one or two copies of a printed item. Online reserves are available 24/7, from any web browser on or off campus. However, not all material (such as an entire book) can be placed online. Below are the guidelines for what may be placed in online reserve. The form for placing materials on online reserve is here.
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What can be placed on e-reserve: |
- Selections from a book, as long as it does not constitute more than 10% of the total contents
- Journal articles -- no more than one article per issue of a journal
- Instructor-authored material (syllabi, quiz solutions, etc.)
Copyrighted material can be placed on reserve for one semester, or nonconsecutive (e.g. Fall and Fall, Spring and Spring) semesters, without securing permission from the publisher.
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Securing Permission for Consecutive Use |
If you wish to place material on reserve for two or more semesters in a row (e.g., both Fall and Spring, or both Spring and Summer), note this on the submission form, and the library will attempt to secure permission for use of the material by contacting the Copyright Clearance Center. The library will pay up to $50 per title and up to $300 per course in permissions fees. If fees for any single title are more than $50, or if the total fees for the course exceed $300, the list of titles and fees will be sent to the instructor for review. If the instructor requests to have the material exceeding the $50/$300 limits put on electronic reserve, the balance will be paid from the department's book budget.
- Fees are per-semester, and may change from one semester to the next.
- Fees vary widely from one publisher to another. The length of the article and the number of students enrolled in the class are also factors.
- We can't guarantee that we will be able to obtain permission for a reasonable fee. Some publishers may be unwilling to grant permission for any fee.
- It sometimes takes several weeks for the CCC to report what the fees will be, so please get these requests in early
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How Online Reserves Are Prepared |
Printed material is scanned in black and white. Reproduction of graphics and photographs is comparable to a photocopy. In order to accommodate off-campus users with modem connections, we try to keep the file sizes as small as possible, by processing scanned documents with OCR[1] software that converts as much as possible of the scanned image to coded text. This means that the documents may appear to consist of a combination of crisp text (where OCR was successful) and "fuzzier" text (where OCR was unable to convert the image to text).
Instructor-authored material can also be e-mailed to library staff as a PostScript file using an online form (you will need to know how to use your software to "print" the document to a disk file in PostScript format).
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How to place material on e-reserve: |
Before requesting e-reserve for a journal article, we encourage you to check our E-Journal Locator to see if the issue of the journal the article appears in is already available online. Many "citation" databases now contain links to full text as well as citations and abstracts. If the material is already available online, then instead of placing it on e-reserve, you could direct your students to look it up in the database -- thus encouraging them to learn some research skills in addition to getting the contents of the article.
Printed forms can be obtained at the library circulation desk, or you can use the online form. Unless you are e-mailing us a PostScript file, we need a photocopy of the material. Please be sure the photocopy is of reasonable quality (not skewed diagonally on the page, and not blurry or smeared.)
Please write down the full name of the course on the form the first time you place an item on reserve for it -- this is the name that will appear on the Electronic Reserves Lists web page.
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Access Control |
To access to e-reserves, students must be currently enrolled at TCU and know their TCU ID number. By default, access is open to anyone with a valid TCU ID.
You may request that access be restricted to students enrolled in the class. If the material is being placed on reserve for consecutive semesters with copyright permission from the Copyright Clearance Center, access is always restricted to students enrolled in the class, due to the terms of our contract with the CCC.
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How students access e-reserves: |
The starting URL for student access to E-Reserves is: http://lib.tcu.edu/ereserves. Links to this page are accessible from the Library home page "Course Reserves" menu link. E-reserve files are stored in PDF ("Acrobat") format, which requires the free Acrobat Reader browser plug-in; once downloaded and installed, this software enables the web browser to view e-reserves and many other documents stored on the web.
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Questions? |
Contact Kerry Bouchard (6809, Library Systems Department) or Karen Weber (6113, Circulation Department) if you have any questions about e-reserves.
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Notes: |
[1] "Optical Character Recognition" - the specific software we use is Acrobat Capture, which produces PDF files that can be read with the free Acrobat Reader browser plug-in.
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