Marketing and Managing Electronic Reserves

Citation

Joint, N. (2008), "Marketing and Managing Electronic Reserves", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 2, pp. 155-156. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810854044

British reviewers of Haworth publications such as Marketing and Managing Electronic Reserves sometimes make fairly predictable criticisms: “It's very good but rather US‐biased: why did the author not take more of an international view?” However, this British reviewer is not going follow that path. True, this monograph is largely USA in content, but for the UK‐based librarian, this is no bad thing.

The editor, Trevor Dawes, has produced a work full of salutary lessons for UK librarians (and librarians internationally): for example, in his introduction, he states quite casually that “In the early‐ to mid‐1990s, libraries began implementing electronic reserve systems for students and faculty.”. Well, not in the UK they did not.

UK copyright law is significantly different from US copyright law, and for me, one of the fascinating aspects of this rich and detailed introduction to managing electronic reserves is its illustration of how the generous USA concept of “fair use” in copyright has made it easier for US librarians to be more innovative than their UK counterparts in their creation of these forms of digital library services. If the UK had had a legal concept of “fair use” in the early 1990s, then our libraries might have begun implementing electronic reserve at that point. But the UK did not and still does not, so libraries here still lag behind the USA to a great degree.

Thus, in reading this work, UK readers must be careful in dealing with the detailed “How to do it” approach of many of the papers. We simply cannot “do it” the way the Americans do it. For example, James Benson's chapter sketches out a workflow summary which starts thus: “Has the item been scanned? Has the item been posted? Does the use of the item fall under Fair Use?” Such “reprographic” educational copying is not permitted under the UK copyright act and the British “fair dealing” concept is in no way equivalent to the “fair use” provision used by US electronic reserve librarians. So we must read Benson's workflow and grit our teeth in resentment, because we do not have the legal concept of fair use!

Having said that, much of the nitty‐gritty detail about IT platforms for electronic reserve is equally relevant to UK librarians: one may choose to create a home‐grown electronic reserve package, or use a dedicated commercial package, or use a platform derived from a big electronic library system, or even use a commercial virtual learning environment (VLE) package as a library application. Reading this work will give a librarian from any country a good idea of the advantages and disadvantages of the various possible approaches.

However, for this reviewer, Dawes's work serves as a benchmark to measure the extent to which the UK has fallen behind the USA in this area of librarianship. David Warner's chapter, which briefly invokes “the first 10 years of electronic [reserve] services, through 2001” is particularly good at charting key moments of advance in the US scene. Rutgers began these services in 1996, and in 1999 uploaded 6,000 electronic reserve items as a pilot project. It would be hard to find many (if any) UK libraries today that have “thousands” of electronic reserve items available – the UK Higher Education Resources Online user group typically comprises member libraries who only upload a few hundred items each year, using largely the legal permissions of the 2005‐2008 Trial CLA HE licence. Dare we say it, Rutgers' digital reserve collection was probably larger in 1999 than the combined digital reserve collections in the entire UK Higher Education community today.

In spite of this, the useful descriptions of contemporary electronic reserve practices laid out in this work will be of great value to librarians worldwide. But, in sum, reading this book left me with one persistent question: how can British universities achieve a leading role in internet‐delivered international distance learning when they are so constrained by their national system of copyright law from developing digital learning services based on significant amounts of content held in our electronic reserve systems?