Electronic Reserves Pilot
Project - In Fall 2001, Circulation staff members from the
Pollak Library began working with a handful of faculty to experiment with
an Electronic Reserve system (e-reserve) in the Pollak Library. The
E-Reserve pilot project allows students and faculty to access course
reserve readings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week using the World Wide Web
interface to the Library’s online catalog, OPAC. During the trial phase of
the project, five faculty members from across the disciplines submitted 36
documents for seven courses; faculty and staff accessed these 36 documents
just over 400 times.
E-reserve materials are integrated with traditional reserve materials in
OPAC and are accessible in the Pollak Library, on campus, and from home
via the WWW. Reserve materials, such as an article from a journal, are
scanned and converted to a "portable document format" using
Adobe’s capture software. These files are then linked to a record in the
Pollak Library’s online catalog, permitting patrons to look up an item
by their professor’s
name or their course
name.
Reserve materials for
which an electronic copy is available say “View Document” at the topic
of the screen. Patrons click on “View Document” and voilà…. the
scanned reserve reading appears. If you are retrieving electronic reserve
readings from outside the Library, you will need to have Adobe’s Acrobat
Reader software set up as a helper application in your WWW
browser. The Library adheres to copyright restrictions surrounding
e-reserves and all users who access a document are “authenticated” or
checked in the Library’s patron database to ensure they are currently
registered.
The pilot project will
continue and expand for the Spring 2002 semester. If you would like to
have your reserve materials included in the second phase of our pilot
project please contact Theresa Liedtka, Access Services Unit Librarian at
7544, Barbara Bloomenstein, Circulation Supervisor at 4061, or Long Lammy,
Reserve Supervisor at 5541. We look forward to working with you in the
future on this exciting new library service.
Theresa Liedtka
Access Services Librarian
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