Electronic Reserve: A Manual and Guide for Library Staff Members

Citation

Brennan, T. (2005), "Electronic Reserve: A Manual and Guide for Library Staff Members", Library Management, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 160-160. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120510580924

Lori Driscoll knows what she is talking about. As Associate University Librarian at the University of Florida, managing course reserves is in her bailiwick.

This easy‐to‐read book is written very much as a how‐to‐do‐it manual for practitioners, so it gets straight to the point. There are very practical chapters on how to plan your service, who to involve, how to market it, how to manage ongoing processes, and how to evaluate it.

In addition, there is a wealth of useful templates and samples to use, including sample policies, forms, FAQs and operational checklists.

Almost everything you need to know about is covered, including pitfalls for the unwary.

A very substantial proportion of the body of the work is devoted to one particularly important issue for managing E‐reserve: copyright.

This is both a strength and a weakness of the book for Australian users. On the plus side, the coverage of copyright issues is extensive, clearly written, practical and highly informative. It should alert any reader to the complexities that need to be negotiated. However, the negative side of this is that the copyright coverage is of limited value for the Australian market because of the substantial differences between the Australian and US copyright law.

The US has no equivalent of Australia's statutory licenses for educational usage, relying instead on its umbrella “fair use” provisions. And, whilst analogous to Australia's “fair dealing” provisions, US fair use is not the same as Australia's fair dealing, and what is permitted for the US educational purposes under fair use does not translate to the Australian context. So different are the key provisions of the US and Australian copyright law as they apply to the University setting that there is a very real danger of the Australian practitioner being led into serious error if following Driscoll's practical and detailed copyright discussion to the letter.

Nevertheless, with this important caveat noted, the book is highly recommended to anyone proposing to embark upon a new E‐reserve system or to review their existing operations. The absolute bounty of helpful resources is simply too good to pass up, and will shorten anyone's implementation timeline!