James Sweetland, Library Link Regional Convenor - USA

As Distance Education (an old idea, but with a new twist thanks to the Internet) becomes one of most popular topics in American higher education, libraries have also become involved, more heavily and faster than one would think.

While there are a number of aspects to this involvement, one which shows the effect of the "Law of Unintended Consequences" is the rapid growth of "electronic reserves." For at least the past fifty years, it has been accepted practice for U. S. academic libraries to maintain a special collection with short circulation times-typically ranging between two to three days, and two hours. The material in these collections is placed there by faculty request, based on anticipated demand based on the fact that the titles are required reading in classes.

The intent of the reserve collection is to permit access to the library's material (and often, material owned by the faculty member and not by the library) to many students within a short time, while obviating the need for the library to purchase multiple copies, and, of course, to permit the student to avoid purchasing the material as well.

Reserve collections increased in size and number beginning in the 1950's, as American teaching moved away from the textbook and into an expectation that all students would become familiar with a large body of literature.

Until recently, the library generally put actual documents on reserve if they were monographs, but made photocopies of articles from journals and other serials, a practice considered "fair use" under the 1976 Copyright Law. In fact, by the late 1970s, if not before, students tended not to read the material in the reserve room, but rather to check it out only long enough to make their own photocopies, again a practice normally accepted as meeting the tenets of the law. In fact, a minor industry grew up of providing copies of all the readings for a given course in one binding, but this changed after legal challenges to the commercial copy shops established that such copying was a violation of U.S. copyrights. (It is still unclear if nonprofit organizations like libraries could provide a similar service).

However, in the last two years, a growing number of academic libraries has been putting some or all of a given course's material on "electronic" reserve, usually by scanning it onto a Web site. While there are obviously copyright and other legal implications, here, another point arises-one which to date has had little or no public comment.

As some course material becomes available on the Web, and as more courses are offered via "distance education", there is an unintended (I think) consequence: students object to having to obtain any material for any course which is not on the Web. In at least one case of which I am aware, students were extremely upset that not all the course material was available through electronic reserve, and at least one became somewhat abusive when the faculty member suggested that students were expected to use libraries. In this case, at least, the student argument was that they were taking the course as distance education precisely because they did not have easy access to libraries.

Thus, the question: since it is unlikely that all material will be able to be scanned into a reserve system (for example, because of copyright constraints), will faculty gradually be pressured to return to the 'textbook" idea? Will what the student is required to read become only that which can be put on the Web? Is a return to the "book of readings" plus textbook of the early 1950's really an improvement?

What do you think? Should distance education students be required only to read what can be found on the Web? How can the rights and needs of authors, publishers, students and teachers be accommodated in the distance education environment? For example, should publishers establish their own "reserves" for a given course; what kind of fee should the publisher or author charge for this sort of use (rarely is the entire book, journal issue or document placed on reserve)?

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