Here it is, hope you enjoy it; all subsequent postings on this topic from me will go to the arl-ereserve listserv which is now definitely in full swing.
--Jeff
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LAMA SASS Circulation and Access Services Discussion Group
Meeting of February 6, 1994 in Los Angeles
Summary prepared by Jeff Rosedale
Susan Marks of the University of Iowa requested that a discussion on Electronic Reserves systems take place at the meeting. As a result, a panel was formed consisting of the following individuals:
Jeff Rosedale, Columbia University Libraries (moderator)
Duane Webster, Association of Research Libraries
Don Bosseau, San Diego State University
Kay Flowers, Rice University
Paul Kobulnicky, University of Pittsburgh.
I began the discussion with a brief overview of electronic reserves issues. In my role as a department head at Columbia, I have felt inclined to find alternatives to traditional reserves services due to pressures of staffing, workflow, and the vision of implementing the virtual library. The attitudes of vendors and permissions services in this process have been helpful, but ultimately they have been unable and/or unwilling to deliver the goods- so it's up to us as academic librarians to define and shape direct instructional support in the electronic environment. Doing so represents a challenge and also an opportunity in reshaping the expectations and behaviors of faculty. Doing so effectively means sharing experiences on our plans, visions, assumptions, and real-life experiences. Although there are some complex and unresolved questions of intellectual property and costs, work in planning, design and implementation continues.
Duane Webster followed my introduction with a dynamic and inspiring presentation. ARL will sponsor a presentation entitled "Transforming the Reserve Function: Providing Instructional Support in an Electronic Age" at Duke University from June 2-4, 1994. This workshop will showcase existing solutions for electronic reserves that have been developed at Duke University, San Diego State University, and Rice University. It will be a hands-on workshop including case studies, demonstrations and discussions lead by experts in the field. Technical issues, copyright concerns, policy issues, campus partnerships and the larger context of instructional support will be addressed. This workshop is designed for institutions intending to implement some form of electronic instructional support by next fall- between five and ten out of the 100 attendees at the meeting indicated they are in such a position. For more information contact Diane Harvey at ARL, 21 Dupont Circle NW, Washington DC 20036 (or email diane[_at_]cni.org). Duane indicated that there might be another gathering planned for the institutions that are "just thinking about it".
Duane spoke about the intellectual property issues directly. ARL is not advocating lawlessness or trying to provoke one or more publishers into litigation. The Library community has worked hard to establish the right of fair use and re-use of materials. Advancing the rights of fair use and special uses for libraries should be one of the goals of the Electronic Reserves initiative. We need to put systems into practice to determine what constitutes reasonable use. Lawyers should alert us to the potential risks of our system designs, but the values and goals of scholarly communication should not be sacrificed on the altar of risk avoidance.
Duane also mentioned that ARL has teamed up with the National Association of College Stores because they share a common interest in supplying information to students. The aforementioned workshop is co-sponsored by NACS, and institutions wishing to participate are asked to invite a representative of their college store to join the librarians in the discussion.
After Duane, Don Bosseau took the podium to relate some real-life experiences from the first practitioners in electronic reserves. Don began his talk by indicating that technology is not the issue in delivering electronic reserves, rather it is the campus politics and policy issues surrounding copyright that challenge the developers of such systems. He mentioned several opinions about the definition of the scanning and networking process involved in electronic reserves, including the view that the reformatting of documents into electronic form constitutes republication. The differences of opinion have limited the technological development of the access side of SDSU's system; efforts have gone towards the development of item-level tracking of the use of materials, and to establish an audit trail to assess and collect fees for use. Nonetheless SDSU is working on a second generation system which will represent great strides over the original, featuring UNIX compatibility and off-site access; it will be designed to be a turnkey system. To date, friendly advice from University counsel to "keep the University out of court" has limited the possibility of taking the technology as far as it can go. Nonetheless, the new system will represent the implementation of a service-driven agenda, not something technology-driven. The current system provides the equivalent of access to an unlimited number of "copies" of an item, since nothing is ever "off the shelf" or "checked out"; it is possible for a student to print out the entire semester's worth of readings for a class, in effect manufacturing his or her own "course pack". One unanticipated benefit of the system is that it is used to print up "replacements" for paper copies that had been lost, stolen or damaged. The system is based on bit-mapped images, which publishers find more acceptable since they are difficult to download or manipulate. In fact, SDSU does not allow downloading, but they have not had complaints about this. There is a charge for laser printing of the images. This represents some continuity with pre-electronic systems when as many as 85% of users used to take physical items directly to photocopiers. Interestingly, users are not allowed to sit at workstations and view entire readings on the screens. Just as interesting is the fact that no suggestions requesting that facility have been received.
Don gave some valuable data about his experiences thus far: SDSU's experience is that a large number of items (50%) change from year to year in Reserves lists. Copyright permissions were obtained through the bookstore; 1059 permissions were required for a single semester. However, of the publishers contacted, only 1.8% asked for royalty payments. Over 4200 documents, representing over 50,000 pages had been scanned, and over 238,000 pages had been printed over the course of the last two semesters. The printing was roughly evenly split between copyrighted and noncopyrighted materials. Marketing of the electronic reserves system has not been undertaken due to the lack of resolution of the copyright issues.
In summarizing his experiences, Don expressed the view that libraries and publishers should find common ground in providing networked electronic access to educational resources. There are currently millions of pages being photocopied with no commission for the publishers. 24 hour 7-day access should be possible on and off the main campus, and this kind of system could support distance education applications. The broad implications of these services merit a unified approach from the library community.
The next speaker was Kay Flowers. She described a "small library" solution for electronic reserves, based on Virtual Notebook System (hereafter VNS) software. The service is networked via a file server for the reserves operation (a shared SUN workstation) which is probably inadequate for the long-term support of this service. Electronic Reserves at Rice was conceptualized as a part of the Electronic Studio project, which aimed at applying technology to instruction. Mosaic is under examination as a platform for X, Windows, and the Macintosh. "Notebooks" of materials are created from scanned articles and organized by class. Access is provided both within the library and elsewhere on campus. Whole books are not scanned as a part of this project; books continue to be circulated as a part of the reserves operation. Non-copyrighted articles or photocopies can be scanned with the permission of the author; with respect to copyrighted articles, royalties could be charged for the reformatting involved in the scanning process, and for each copy as well; alternatively, the scanned copy could be treated as a master, with free access to other "copies" for one semester. Royalty payments should be arranged if the use extends beyond one semester. Other variables include the interpretation of specific sections (language in sections 101 and 107 in particular), of the copyright law. Mary Brandt Jensen's article of last March does the most comprehensive job of explaining rights and obligations to date. It is generally agreed that image format is more parallel to traditional reserves uses, and thus to fair use rights, than is ASCII text.
In Kay's experience, the utility of the Copyright Clearance Center for electronic services is currently limited to the production of anthologies; rights for electronic access to individual documents have not been negotiated. Access through the CCC means tracking use at the item level and paying royalties for all use.
Monitoring of use has been added to the functionality of VNS.
The VNS system is UNIX-based and runs best on an X-Windows interface. There is also a Macintosh version in production, and a Windows version in development. There may be problems in trying to provide access in a "least common denominator" form. Charging for copies is currently done through the use of debit cards; it is also possible to charge to an account over the network. This is desirable because it reduces money handling. Initially, the scanning resolution was set at 150 dpi (equivalent to a monochrome fax); this was found to be insufficiently clear, and the best way to ascertain the ideal resolution remains old fashioned trial and error. Optimal resolution is governed by the conflicting goals of maximizing legibility and minimizing file size. Other problems include the variation in screen resolution; the X-windows screen is 108 dpi, while the Macintosh is 72 dpi. A 150 dpi scan is about 1/3 larger on both sides than an X-terminal; on a Mac it's twice as big in both directions, or 4 times as big. This makes for a lot of scrolling around for some users. Photoshop software was used for the scanning. Enhancing and altering the images is possible but the time needed to do so makes the operation very expensive- there are a lot of potential tradeoffs in time/cost that could reduce the efficiency of this service overall. Security has been a concern, and access is currently governed by two layers of IDs and passwords. Class accounts are also possible but would reduce accountability and accuracy in tracking use. Evaluation of the service is to be based on accessibility, legibility and utility of the information in the system. This fall, the system will be used for 2-6 test classes; full implementation is hoped for by the fall of 1995.
Finally, Paul Kobulnicky addressed the group. The University of Pittsburgh 's libraries are using an electronic course reserves system as the beginning of a learning process of distributing textual and graphic information over a campus network, and concurrently trying to improve reserve services. Local foundation support in the neighborhood of $250,000 serves as seed money for this process. The University library system is complex, including an autonomous law and medical library as well as four regional campuses. Student computing fees are used to generate capital funding for automation projects, and all of the various parties collaborate on planning. The development of electronic reserves is envisioned as a 2-year process, with a pilot in place by next fall. The ultimate goal is for open access to the University community even if a user is off-site. Searching will lead to the possibility of multiple forms of display and/or use, from "lowest common denominator" terminals to laser printing and FAX transmission. High-end display devices on campus will be utilized and client software will be available. The system will initially be image-based. Paul anticipated that momentum from user demand for such a system will fuel its development and will motivate faculty to get further involved. Paul's intention is that systems planning and copyright policy issues be addressed on two separate tracks that will converge in time and action. Reserves can and should evolve into a more effective vehicle of instructional support through the use of technology- including full-text reserves articles, textbooks, multi- and hypermedia.
In a synergy session that Paul co-lead at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information last fall, the consensus was that assuming access to electronic information will be based on collecting royalties undermines the right of fair use. We can and should extend the rights of fair use (as expressed in the 1982 ALA guidelines) to electronic formats, differentiating access according to the type of information and/or user group. A sense of common practice in this area needs to be developed. Much of the work in dealing with copying of materials has been undertaken since the arrival of the photocopier. We should not have such difficulty devising rules for electronic copying. Effective planning for these services, and in fact the nature of electronic information itself, demands an opening to access across institutional boundaries. Planning for electronic reserves is not an endpoint, just a milestone. We need to avoid "legal free fall"- a situation in which there is too much uncertainty and change is happening too fast to codify. We should start by defining sets of principles to allow for restructuring of operational guidelines. Forerunners in this area include the Triangle Research Libraries Group and the AAU Intellectual Property task force. On the local level, Paul has created a local Pitt task force with broad constituency to develop intellectual property policy in the networked environment. The task force includes representation from the libraries, the faculty, the computer center, academic administration, legal counsel, the University Press, the bookstore and the law school. This is part of the process to educate the University community on the legal and ethical issues in instruction and learning. Paul believes that the scholarly information community can build on existing relationships with publishers in ways that include some accountability for the use of copyrighted information but that also recognizes the importance of fair use.
In the brief question and answer period that followed these presentations, Don Bosseau mentioned that publishers are more likely to put time limits on access to materials in electronic form than they are to restrict access by user or ask for a fee.
Duane announced the initiation of a new listserv dedicated to electronic reserves issues on the server operated by the Coalition for Networked Information. To subscribe, send a message to listproc[_at_]cni.org with the text:
subscribe arl-ereserve <your name>
I was struck by Duane's comment during the question and answer period to the effect that "experimentation will become practice, and practice will become policy". This is the ultimate Electronic Reserves wake-up call.
With the attendance list now in hand, I can say that the following institutions had at least one attendee at this discussion: University of Arizona, UCLA, San Diego State University, University of Pittsburgh, Wheaton College, University of Iowa, Boston College, Florida International University, Loyola University, CSU Northridge, Stanford University, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, Washington University, University of Chicago, MIT, Colorado State University, Rice University, University of Michigan, Occidental College, Purdue University, Oregon State University, Appalachian State University, Reed College, University of Akron, Ohio State University, Penn State, Triangle Research Libraries network, University of Florida at Gainesville, Columbia University, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, University of California at Santa Cruz, Brandeis University, Ball State University, USDA National Agricultural Library, Brown University, Library of Congress, Florida Center for Library Automation, University of Pennsylvania, University of California at San Diego, University of the Pacific, University of Delaware, University of Maryland, Yale University, Vanderbilt University, University of Rochester, University of Wisconsin- Stout, University of California at Santa Barbara, Michigan Technological University, St. John's University, Texas A & M University, Arizona State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Northwestern University, San Jose State University, George Washington University, Rutgers University, University of Minnesota; also a representative of University Microforms International. Received on Thu Feb 24 1994 - 22:59:19 GMT
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