Reserve Policies and Procedures - Library Services, West Chester University

Reserve Policies and Procedures

Print Reserves

Until recently, print reserves served as the Library's sole means for making reserve course material available to students. While electronic reserves has replaced print reserves in most cases, some materials, such as books, prohibitively lengthy documents, and items that cannot be scanned legibly, are best suited for print reserves. The hard copies of these materials are shelved or filed at reserves, where they are available to students for a time period designated by the instructor. Most print reserve items are required to be used in the library, but instructors may choose to allow items to be checked out for periods ranging from a few hours to a few days to a few weeks.

To place items on reserve in print form, please bring the materials to the reserve desk, complete a reserves form, and fill out a log kept at the desk. Two weeks' processing time is requested, especially at peak times such as the beginning of a semester. If time allows, materials can be mailed to reserves along with a completed form, which is available for download on the library web page.

In accordance with U.S. copyright law, the Library will place only one (1) copy of a copyrighted work on reserve. If you wish to place multiple copies on reserve, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Guidelines for obtaining copyright permission are available at the reserve desk.

Fair use guidelines require copied materials to be removed from reserves at the end of each semester, so faculty must obtain permission from the copyright holder to place the same article on reserve for subsequent semesters.

Fines for overdue reserve materials are $1.00 per day.

Electronic Reserves

We use ERes by Docutek to place articles, chapters, solutions, sample exams, Powerpoint presentations, etc. in course pages on the web. The system is easy for students to use and allows them to view and print material for classes from any convenient PC at any time.

Faculty can manage their own course pages if they wish, or they may have them managed by the reserve desk.

Managing your own course pages on ERes
An account for each faculty member is created by default when an ERes course page is created. Faculty can manage their own pages and even create new ones if they would like. ERes is designed to be easy to use yet powerful, and faculty can take advantage of the system to add their own links, announcements, folders, etc., as well as manage their own chat rooms and discussion boards. Instructions for using your account within ERes to manage your pages are available on the Library web page and at the reserve desk.

Having the reserve desk manage your course pages on ERes
Faculty can submit items for electronic reserves in a variety of ways. Items in electronic format, such as exams created in MSWord, can simply be emailed as an attachment to cwilliams2@wcupa.edu. Items in paper format, such as journal articles, should be brought to the reserve desk, where an appropriate form can be completed. Library staff will handle scanning or formatting materials and make them available over the web, where they can be accessed by a specific course page URL, by links to ERes from the FHG Library home page, or by going directly to ERes at http://eres.wcupa.edu/courseindex.asp .

Guidelines for submitting items for electronic reserves
To make our process as efficient as possible and to provide the best quality materials for students, we ask faculty to follow these guidelines:

The Library will make items available on ERes if they are suitable for this format. We will not normally duplicate electronic reserves with paper copies at the reserve desk.
Materials should be submitted three weeks prior to assigning them to students. Under exceptional circumstances, we will attempt to rush materials if possible, but we cannot guarantee that we will be able to process materials in less than three weeks.
Please provide a clean, sharp copy of the material. Please do not reduce the photocopy to fit two pages on one sheet or staple the pages or provide copies with underlining or highlighting. Do not submit copies in sizes other than 8 ½ x 11". The quality of the original is of utmost importance.
Materials must be accompanied by the reserve form, which is available at the reserve desk and online for downloading at http://www.wcupa.edu/library.fhg/pdfs/electronic_reserve_form.pdf . See library website under "Reserves."
Faculty are asked to provide photocopies, rather than originals, of journal articles, book chapters and other hard-copy documents to facilitate the scanning process. In order for us to do our work well, we ask that you provide a good copy of the material.
We request that you limit the number of items for the Library to scan for electronic reserves to 20 per course. And at this point, we ask that you submit only required materials, not optional readings. There are no such restrictions, however, if you choose to manage your own course pages.

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