Program Management & Publishing: Grants, Reading Lists & Reserves: Home

It is imperative that you create a set of copyright and fair use guidelines, and train staff how to apply them, in order to manage submissions and requests for reading lists. If library staff do not apply fair use in good faith, and a lawsuit is brought against them, they are liable for extensive statutory damages in addition to actual damages. 

General Counsel

It is incredibly helpful to be able to let instructors and other collaborators know that the guidelines being applied were developed in conjunction with general counsel. Ideally, there is a general counsel's office at your institution; if not, you'll have to do your best to interpret available scholarship and other libraries' policies and guidelines. General counsel's office will give you a small window with which to work with general counsel or another counsel in their office. Draft guidelines according to your library's interpretation of fair use and copyright law, and share them along with any evidence or supporting documentation ahead of the meeting. With luck, general counsel will work through the guidelines with you and library management, approving what they agree with or editing what they don't agree with.

Fair Use After the Cambridge/Oxford/Sage Lawsuit

For background, see GSU Library Copyright Lawsuit, a LibGuide by the GSU Law Library chronicling the twists and turns of the case with a timeline, links to case documents, and related content.

When the dust settled, the courts made clear that fair use is determined by a qualitative assessment of each instance of copying using the four-factor test and conclusions proceed from the unique facts of the case. This is in distinction to using a quantitative approach based on a mathematical formula. 

The problem for libraries is that library staff administering eReserves have largely used conservative quantitative guidelines, commonly based on some limits established in the US Copyright Office's "Circular 21," to keep requests for eReserves in a range of what they considered likely to be fair use. Library staff do not have the time to read each book and make an informed four-factor test determination about the portion requested to be used, but what are they to base their decisions on when managing instructor requests to digitize fair use portions of their physical collections? 

Each library offering eReserves and reading list management services must grapple with the question of how to efficiently offer their services within a good faith fair use framework. A good first step is making available to instructors using their services online guidance (the guidelines developed with general counsel) for determining fair use by performing a four-factor test. A good second step is either 1) informing instructors that it is their responsibility to perform the test before submitting digitization requests for course materials or 2) providing a form field or checkbox in the course materials requesting workflow for faculty to make a fair use claim for the request in question while submitting the request. On top of that, it is also possible for a library to assess the risk of using a mathematical formula like they have in the past. Based on the results of the lawsuit where 99 infringement claims were bought by Cambridge, Oxford, and Sage, ultimately only 10 infringements were found and the remainder were fair use. Remember the 99 infringement claims are the ones the plaintiff found most likely to be judged infringements, and doesn't include a great number of uses which were unlikely to be infringements. So out of these 99 very strong cases you end up with only about 1:10 odds that the plaintiffs are correct in their infringement claims. 

At the end of the day and operating within an uncertain legal environment, libraries need to be confident that they are protecting their staff who are delivering course materials. They and their staff must believe in good faith that they are applying fair use fairly and legally.

Plan to commit time at start-up for Outreach & Training, and then expect to commit a certain amount of time each semester as word-of-mouth brings more instructors your way. You will also need to train librarians and instructional designers. With these commitments, developing documentation, presentations, and demo reading lists will greatly improve your outreach, and make it easier for multiple staff doing outreach to be more consistent. 

Instructional Designers

Most reading management systems are integrated into the institution's LMS, and by virtue of getting permission and support in that strategy, library staff usually come into closer contact with LMS administrators and instructional designers (IDs). Working together, IDs can bring library staff into direct contact with potential faculty adopters in course design sessions, or if the instructor's course site has some copyright problems that IDs think the library can help address. IDs can help supply interested early adopters for pilots and then during full implementation, they have a good idea which courses and instructors are a good fit for the reading list treatment. Course materials staff should be trained together as much as possible to ensure mutual understanding and consistency.

Instructors

An instructor who is referred to the library or contacts the library after hearing about the program usually needs a 30-45 minute one-on-one session with the Reading List Management program manager or any of the core reading list staff to decide if they want to move forward. Ongoing communication with instructors is one of the most difficult tasks of any reading list management program. Setting up the workflow to cue the instructors to notify you can be a big help, but if they forget to hit a "submit" button, their changes can sit there with no attention paid to them by the library staff. A safety net for this is to set up reports to see new citations and changed statuses, and this requires monitoring time for course materials staff everyday.

Library Staff

Libraries need to make a decision who will be responsible for the program. The responsibility can lie in public services, either with a team or an individual, and making one person ultimately responsible normally works more smoothly than a team effort. Otherwise the library can choose a responsible program manager from management or back office staff. How training plays out depends on how this initial responsibility is assigned.  Library staff who work with instructors should have a basic understanding of the workflows and copyright and fair use guidelines. Course materials staff should be trained together to ensure consistency and should meet every few weeks to cover new developments and new software releases.

Reading list management is a complex and time-consuming task. Do not expect to implement a reading list management system without significant staffing devoted to it. There is more urgency to troubleshooting and faster turnaround time expected for course delivery problems than what libraries are accustomed to, so someone must be monitoring the system every day of the week.  

To-Dos for Review

Reading list management systems use review to-dos to alert library staff something has happened in the workflows (to the reading list or a citation) that may require your attention (called Tasks in Leganto and Review Alerts in Talis Aspire). These review to-dos drive everyday work in reading list management. Some common notifications: 

Broken Links

Links break over time, or never work in the first place in some cases with link resolvers. Some systems have a way for users to report broken links. Fixing broken links is an art as it is often difficult to duplicate the behavior after a link is reported broken. With broken links, there are a handful of possibilities to consider when troubleshooting:

• Is there a problem with the citation or link resolver? If so, fix the citation by using a direct permalink instead.
• The user's browser is not able to load the page at the link because of browser settings like blocking third party cookies. If your link reporting tool identifies the user reporting the link, this becomes more like a service ticket where outreach to the user is required to get more information.
• The user simply doesn't understand how to navigate to the full text when delivered to a citation page in a database. Contact the user if possible and provide instructions for accessing full-text, or attach the PDF for them to use.
• The link URL is missing the proxy information.
• Sometimes a database's knowledge base information is incorrect, and the library does not actually have access to what the knowledge base thinks it does. On the flipside, sometimes databases are missing digitized content where it is promised. These are both support cases to vendors.
• Depending on browser settings, the user may download a PDF directly to their tray or in the background to a downloads folder, but not notice it. When troubleshooting with the user, check to see if this could be the problem.
• Occasionally users will have internet filtering software running which blocks the content. They will need to disable their software while accessing the reading list to be able to visit or download the content.

Rollover

Courses and course sections are usually offered more than once, so it is a task to anticipate the next time a course with a reading list is offered before the instructor does, and reach out proactively to see if they would like to continue using the service. Libraries load all courses that aren't already in the system, and often load a semester up to 3-4 months in advance. If instructors start trying to make things work with their old list, it invariably causes issues. For instance, linking an old list to a newer section of the same course will backfire where there are copyright dates listed (for licensed content and for uploaded fair use portions). 

The reading list management systems have developed functionality to address this vexing task, but it often is not sufficient, depending on how your course numbering system works. It is normal for a course section to be taught again with a different instructor, or if it is taught by the same structure it may be listed under a different course section.

Many libraries resort to lookup functionality in Excel (e.g., VLOOKUP, where a list of all past courses is kept. To compare these to new all the new courses loaded into your library system, the specifics of year and section must be removed from the course IDs and an instructor's name added to what remains to have a somewhat generic portmanteau-like alphanumeric entity. So if you had a course from the past with a reading list with Course ID 202301LIBR101-3 taught by Gordon Sumner, and there was a new course loaded into the system for an upcoming semester with Course ID 202401LIBR101-1 also taught by Gordon Sumner, then after making both of them generic with respect to date, semester and course section, they would both be listed as LIBR101Sumner, and they would match. Once you have your matching list of new courses, library course materials staff would start contacting the instructors for the courses for which they are responsible.