Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

Australia
In Australia, the development of electronic reserves was problematic
until 2001 when the copyright law was changed to allow core readings
to be scanned for educational use. This was to be undertaken under
licence from the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), Australia’s
reprographic rights organisation, which operates in a similar manner to
the UK’s Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and offers licences that allow
authorised copying at different types of establishment. The Electronic
Reproduction and Communication Licence covers reproduction in an
electronic form (e.g. digital to digital) and communication of copies in
electronic form (e.g. posting copies on an intranet). Following this
change in the law, electronic reserve systems were established in many
academic libraries. An example is the University of South Australia
which set up a Digital Resource Management Centre to provide central
record keeping of all print materials that are digitised to support the
University’s teaching and learning programmes.
19
Similarly, Adelaide
University established the Digital Resources Management Centre as part
of an initiative by the University Library, the Division of the University
Secretary and the Learning and Teaching Development Unit. It was set
up to monitor the production of copyright material in digital format and
to ensure compliance with copyright legislation.
Electronic reserves in the UK
The development of electronic reserves projects in UK academic libraries
has been shaped by the eLib programme which, through projects such as
ACORN and SCOPE, discussed earlier in this chapter, demonstrated the
need for such services and the technical capabilities to provide it. The
launch of the HERON (Higher Education Resources on-demand)
Project, which subsequently became first a JISC-funded then a
commercial service, has allowed many universities to outsource the
associated copyright clearance and digitisation work. However, despite
many local and national initiatives since the early 1990s, the restrictive
nature of UK copyright law and the inadequate provision of a scalable
licensing model for digital texts have meant that electronic reserves have
generally remained small scale and been based on pilot projects.
Electronic reserves are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, which
includes a case study from a UK university which has managed to
introduce significant electronic reserve services. There is a considerable
body of experience in the UK community; however, this currently lies
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The digital library
almost exclusively within the HERON User Group and on the private
mailing list for HERON members.
E-books
The term e-book has a variety of meanings, but generally it applies to
published materials, such as reference books or monographs, that have
been converted into digital format for electronic distribution. E-books
offer significant advantages to the learner with improved access to
reading material, 24 hours a day, from any location. It is possible to
download many e-books to personal digital assistants (PDAs) or other
handheld devices making them truly portable. From the perspective of
libraries, e-books do not require shelf space in the library and cannot be
damaged or removed from the collection like a physical book. Some of
the first e-books were launched by start-up companies who struck deals
with academic and commercial publishers to make their reading material
available. There are now significant numbers of traditional publishers
offering e-book services to libraries or directly to the public. In addition
to this there has been significant investment of public and private money
into digitising out-of-copyright works, including many classic texts and
making them freely available on the Internet.
Project Gutenberg maintains that it is the Internet’s oldest producer of
free e-books, being started in 1971 by Michael Hart at the University of
Illinois who first typed in the American Declaration of Independence.
20
Starting in 1991, Project Gutenberg began to take its current form, with
many different texts being added and targets defined. The target for
1991 was one book a month. 1992’s target was two books a month. This
target doubled every year through 1996, when it hit 32 books a month.
Currently the Project has a target of 400 books a month. The present
collection of more than 10,000 e-books was produced by hundreds of
volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg ‘eBooks’ are older literary
works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be
freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use.
Free e-books are also available from numerous other sources and the
Internet Public Library maintains a list of online texts.
21
The Electronic
Text Center at the University of Virginia was established in 1992 and
currently includes approximately 70,000 on- and off-line humanities
texts in 13 languages, with more than 350,000 related images (book
illustrations, covers, manuscripts, newspaper pages, page images of
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
Special Collections books, museum objects, etc.). They currently provide
access to over 1,800 e-books in Microsoft Reader format.
In the UK, e-books were part of a major study funded by JISC, EBONI
(Electronic Books on-screen Interface) which ran for 20 months from
August 2000.
22
JISC subsequently set up an e-books Working Group,
which published a paper in 2001 examining the associated issues
(Woodward and Edwards, 2001). The paper provides a useful overview
of the major issues.