Electronic Reserves> Tennant speaks....

[Steve Cramond]

For me, the breakthrough on electronic reserves came when I read a paper
from the the conference "The Universe at Your Fingertips: Continuing Web
Education", April 1997. It was by Phil Kesten, the principal of Docutek,
and his description of their product had me "running" to his Web site to
get more information, and shortly thereafter I "ran" to decision makers at
my library to get support for a pilot project. The rest, as they say, is
history. For the Fall 1997 semester, we had around 45,000 document views
(out of close to a quarter million hits) for maybe a couple dozen courses.
At that point it was still in a limited test. Now we are starting to roll
it out to everyone. All those involved think it is a great solution --
even, somewhat to our surprise (since faculty are responsible for mounting
their own content), the faculty. Recently we responded to an ARL SPEC kit
survey on E-Reserves systems, so you may want to contact them about the
publication schedule for it.

The Docutek Web site is at:

http://www.docutek.com/

and our implementation of it is at:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ERes/

Some courses are password-protected, others are not, so you may need to
poke around a bit to find one that's open.

Docutek has been incredibly responsive throughout. They worked with one of
our professors to incorporate a method to submit items via fax, which
greatly extends the reach of the system to faculty without scanners who
wish to mount hand-written materials. One time when we had a required
database file that became corrupted, Docutek staff logged into our system
and pieced the file back together for us. Their response has always been
speedy and effective.

But the bottom line is that this is a system we can live with. The Library
simply provides the infrastructure (storage, the Docutek software, a Web
server), creates and manages accounts, and publicizes and supports the
service. The faculty are then responsible for creating and managing their
own reserve materials. 

One caveat is that this system works best for courses that do not require
placing entire books or other large masses of material online. But then,
that would be a drawback for any reserves system.

I have no connection with Docutek except as a satisfied customer, and one,
I might add, who is unspeakably happy to have such a simple and yet
elegant solution to what seemed at first to be a black hole for staff
time.
Roy Tennant

On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Jim Douglas wrote:

> Hello:
> My name is Jim Douglas and I am Electronic Resources Librarian at Conant
> Library, Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts. I also am looking into
> e-reserves and hope to implement a system here during the summer. While a
> number of institutions already have instituted a system and many more are
now
> working on one, it seems no one has shared the nuts-and-bolts of how to
set one
> up.(Anybody listening?)  From what I have seen, e-reserves essentially
includes
> either copying documents and making them available as Web pages or scanning
> them and converting them to PDF files or something similar, mounting them
on a
> server with access links (generally from some Web page), and password
> protecting some or all documents depending on copyright concerns.  How
you go
> about it will depend, of course, on a number of factors, including:
> 
> hardware/software options
> copyright issues (what documents will be made avaialble?  What
> procedures/policies will
>        be put into place to make sure of compliance with copyright law?)
> amount of material to be placed on e-reserve (Ths in turn will impact the
> choice of
>        software/hardware)
> manpower (scanning, for example)
> technological knowhow (for example, if you want to go all in-house, does
> someone in the
>     organization know how to password- protect documents, will you need CGI
>     scripts/JAVA applications, etc.)
> 
> There are a few turn-key solutions available and I suspect we will see
more in
> the near future.  Because we are such a small institution (but one that,
> fortunately, already has the hardware/software needed for our purposes),
we are
> going to go with an in-house solution (myself with a lot of help from my
tech
> colleagues; the IT department and the library recently merged; this will
be a
> good project to demonstrate the benefits of such a merger).
> 
> One of the best online resources I've found is
> 
> Electronic Reserves Clearinghouse: Links and Materials on the Web
> 
> at
> 
> http://www.cc.columbia.edu/~rosedale/#copyright
> 
> You might also take a look at two (now somewhat old but still excellent)
papers
> from I  library school students that are available online:
> 
> "Digital Reserves"  by Carolyn Sprague, Donna Movsovich, Sara Hively,
Jonathan
> Kelly, V.Delphine Khanna
> at
> http://web.syr.edu/~jfkell01/531report.html
> 
> and
> 
> "How I spent my summer vacation: Electronic Reserve Systems" by Elizabeth
> Kraemer
> at
> http://www.uky.edu/~kraemer/Beth/ind_stud.htm
> 
> I would be most interested in the responses you receive and I suspect many
> others on the list would appreciate a summary of responses as well.
> 
> Jim Douglas, Electronic Resources Librarian
> Conant Library
> Nichols College
> Dudley, MA 01571
> 1-508-213-2333
> E Mail: douglajs at nichols.edu
> 
> 
> Rene Paquin wrote:
> 
> > Hello all
> >
> > Has anyone established an electronic course reserve system?
> > I sure would like to know about it ie implementation, software, hardware,
> > etc.  This is something the librarians are discussing and I am just
> > starting to do some research on this topic.  Any help would be
appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > Rene Paquin
> > Network Administrator
> > Wilfrid Laurier University, Library
> > Waterloo, Ontario
> >
> > (519)669-5509
> > rpaquin at wlu.ca
> 
> 
> 
> 




Regards,
    ___________________________________________________________________

Steve Cramond 
Electronic Information Resources Librarian
University of Adelaide Library 

eMail: scramond at library.adelaide.edu.au
Phone: +61 8 8303 3629
Fax: +61 8 8303 4369
Postal Address: University of Adelaide Library, Adelaide SA 5005,
Australia