Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

Permission requests: what to include
Appendix 2 presents a sample letter that can be used when seeking to
obtain copyright permission to use a digitised version of a textbook.
Generally, when trying to obtain permission it is sensible to include
information about:
■
where the material will be hosted – it might be useful to include the
URL of the site;
■
access to the site – password protection facilities, how you ensure only
authorised persons will access the material;
■
the format of the material you wish to make available: PDF, Word
documents, XML, etc.;
■
duration of copyright you are requesting – whether the material will
be made available for a limited period of time;
■
who will be accessing the material – if it’s for a specific course, how
many students are on the course, who is teaching it, what is the name
of the course?
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Digitisation
Many publishers are happy for you to digitise the material yourself,
provided it is an exact representation of the original published work and
not modified in any way. Other publishers may request that you use their
own digital copy of the work or obtain a copy from a trusted repository,
digitised to a particular quality standard.
In-house digitisation
In-house digitisation on the surface may appear to be an obvious
solution, but you should consider carefully the staffing and equipment
costs of such a service. These will vary depending on the quality of the
files you are aiming to produce and the volume of material that you are
hoping to purchase, but the minimum requirements for in-house
digitisation would be:
■
dedicated PC and scanner;
■
robust scanner, preferably with sheet feeder;
■
dedicated server space (with files typically 1 MB in size, ensure the
server has sufficient capacity for expansion);
■
staff time to undertake scanning.
The purchase of the equipment may actually be the least of the problems
associated with in-house digitisation. One of the greatest challenges may
be finding staff time to scan the material. The equipment also needs to
be set up to ensure that material is scanned to an appropriate resolution
that allows it to be read on screen or printed out, but does not result in
excessively large files. Another important decision is whether to use
optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the material to
text format. This will drastically reduce the file size, but does take
additional time as documents need to be proofread to ensure errors have
not been introduced and to remove artefacts such as line-break hyphens
and page numbers.
Outsourced digitisation
Increasingly in the UK, institutions are looking to outsource digitisation
of core readings. This is particularly useful if staff and equipment are not
available. In the UK the primary service offering digitisation of such
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readings is the HERON Service, which is now part of Ingenta UK.
Outsourcing has several advantages, in particular:
■
staff time and equipment is not required to carry out the digitisation
work;
■
less staff training in new skills is necessary;
■
the material does not have to be physically held by the library – such
services generally acquire clean photocopies from the British Library;
■
better quality files are usually received – including text files which are
extremely time consuming to produce in-house.
There are several disadvantages to using such a service, including:
■
material can take longer to process than in-house;
■
the service is often less flexible than an in-house service;
■
there may be higher overall costs: for example, the HERON Service
typically charge approximately £30 per item for digitisation, in
addition to any copyright costs;
■
if your collection has specialist material that cannot be obtained from
the British Library it may be necessary to supply a digital copy or
photocopy of the article – so some staff time is still associated with
outsourced production.
There are obvious advantages to national or international trust
repositories that can supply institutions with high-quality digitised
materials. In the UK, the HERON Service is trying to build its reputation
in this role. However, outside the UK, generally universities are
continuing to scan articles individually as they are needed. The files have
the advantage that once they have been scanned they can be reused.
However, with an increasing number of electronic journals and e-books,
it is anticipated that demand for electronic reserves services may
eventually reduce dramatically.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined a wide range of copyright and licensing issues
associated with the use of library resources in a virtual learning
environment. As librarians you may be asked to advise academic staff on
a range of issues and ensure that where they are using resources they are
not infringing copyright. This chapter cannot hope to answer all the
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questions you will encounter, but it should provide a good grounding in
many of the major topics. Further reading and resources are listed in the
References.
Notes
1.
See: http://www.wipo.int/about-wipo/en/overview.html
2.
See American Library Association (ALA): http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/