Reserve permissions not fast enough ?

Jeff Rosedale said:

> So far, however, I have not been convinced that any entity can
> satisfactorily deliver copyright permissions on a scale and in a
> time frame that serve the needs of an operation like mine. This is
> certainly not to say that putting materials required for a single
> course on reserve electronically is impossible. But from an
> operational standpoint, achieving gains in efficiency and cost as well
> as service enhancement from utilizing electronic technology for
> reserves on a larger scale is what I desire- and that is the elusive
> vision I alluded to.

Last night I was discussing this with a friend who has a satellite dish set up for receiving television programs. He has a "black box" that can unscramble the signals. He did the following: Identified a program in the guide that he would like to see, pulled out his VISA card called a 800 number gave them his VISA card # and the number of his unscrambler, and the picture went from scrambled to unscrambled in less than five minutes. They sent a signal over satellite directly to his, and only to his, black box. His VISA account was debted for the cost of the call and program.

It is not that we don't have the technology, it is that we are not willing to pay more for it. Why don't publishers have an equivalent to Books in Print on the Internet that is a consortium? Why do the depend on libraries using Bowkers behind the times CDROM? Not organized enough? Even the used book dealers were able to get ANTIQUARIA up and running in a very brief time. Do publishers know about the Internet? CARL has a nice debit system for periodical copies, copyright paid and all.

Do we just need to nudge the publishers?

    --Thaddeus lgllawlib[_at_]technet.nm.org       Supreme Court Law Library (NM) Received on Thu Sep 23 1993 - 00:42:10 GMT