by Susan Magee
General Library Columnist
Which scenario sounds familiar?
A. You go to the library to check out a course reserve only to find that one of your classmates has beaten you to it. B. You check a course reserve out and then find a vital page or two missing from the packet. C. You forgot your LOBO card and have to find someone else in the class willing to check out the course reserve so you can use it.
If any or all of these have happened to you, you've probably also wondered why the service is so frustrating.
Last spring, the UNM General Library began a pilot project aimed at two problems: limited availability of reserve materials and lost pages. We asked a few of the faculty who regularly put materials on reserve to allow us to scan in those materials and make them available to their students electronically. The pilot was very successful for everyone concerned. The library was able to improve on an old service -- a perpetual goal for us.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
During this semester, the electronic reserves pilot project was extended and open to any faculty member interested in participating. One hundred and fifty-eight faculty members accepted the invitation. Library staff introduced them to the process of setting up the class accounts and showed them how to add the materials for the 174 classes they teach.
In September and October alone, these 2,322 documents have been accessed almost 47,000 times compared to the approximately 20,000 times a single course reserve item in paper form has been checked out from the reserve desk during the same time period.
The documents used in reserves, both paper and electronic, include anything from class syllabi, quizzes and Powerpoint presentations to articles and book chapters. The electronic course reserve materials are restricted by a password provided by the professor to the class just as the paper reserves are available only to UNM students with LOBO cards. Both these security measures help preserve our fair use doctrine under copyright law.
The major constraint to placing material on E-Reserve is file size. Materials scanned from paper copies are saved as pdf files at the most economical resolution possible in order to be legible when printed out or read on screen.
Even so, the files tend to become unwieldy if longer than 25 pages. No matter what the size of the file, remember that during certain times of the day, usually early to mid-afternoon, the Internet seems to slow to a crawl because of the traffic on it; downloading anything at this time can be difficult. In addition to lengthy articles and high traffic volumes, other formats may come with their own difficulties. So far, we haven't been asked to add film or music clips, but those are certainly possible -- provided they comply with both copyright restrictions and fall within optimum size constraints.
Ultimately, our goal is to have as much of the course reserve materials available through the E-Reserves service as possible.
Hours, during finals: In recognition of requests for longer hours during finals, Zimmerman will again have extended hours beginning Dec. 4. Go to http://www.unm.edu/~zimref/fall02hours.pdf for the complete list.
