There are few topics that are more confusing to librarians than the issue of electronic course reserves, and so I held out high hopes for a new article in the current issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship (JAL). "Copyright Procedures and the Deciphering of Fair Use in the Creation of Reserves at Major University Libraries," by Thomas H.P. Gould, Tomas A. Lipinski, and Elizabeth A. Buchanan (found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.02.001 for those of you with a subscription to ScienceDirect) promised to be a useful addition to the literature. Lipinski, after all, is the co-author (with our own Mary Minow) of the invaluable The Library's Legal Answer Book.
The conclusion of the article is fine - namely that those libraries that set rigid limits on how much of a copyrighted work they will copy for reserves do not understand the case law or relevant guidelines. Overall, though, there are better sources of information on course reserves.
If you want thoughtful analyses of the legal status of reserve copying, you would do better to review Lolly Gasaway's chapter "Copyright Considerations for Electronic Reserve" from Jeff Rosedale's Managing Electronic Reserves, or Peggy Hoon's "Recent Copyright Law Developments: Digitizing Text, Image Collections, and Audio Materials," or the nuanced discussion of ereserves in Carrie Russell's Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide for Librarians, or the ARL/ALA statement on "Applying Fair Use in the Development of Electronic Reserves Systems," none of which are cited by the authors.
Still, you can't argue with the basic conclusion in this piece - namely that librarians can't develop course reserve policies and then use them blindly year after year. Our understanding of the boundaries of fair use are constantly changing as the publishing market and court decisions evolve. Library course reserve policies must similarly evolve.
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