Place Materials on Reserve

Course reserves provide a method to ensure that materials are available to students on a limited basis and that all students in a course will have an opportunity to access the materials.

Items that can be placed on reserve:

• Selections from a book, as long as it does not constitute more than 10% of the total contents
• Journal articles -- no more than one article per issue of a journal
• Instructor-authored material (syllabi, quiz solutions, etc.)

Copyrighted material can be placed on reserve for one semester, or nonconsecutive (e.g. Fall and Fall, Spring and Spring) semesters, without securing permission from the publisher.

If you wish to place material on reserve for two or more semesters in a row (e.g., both Fall and Spring, or both Spring and Summer), note this on the submission form, and the library will attempt to secure permission for use of the material by contacting the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). The library will pay up to $50 per title and up to $300 per course in permissions fees. If fees for any single title are more than $50, or if the total fees for the course exceed $300, the list of titles and fees will be sent to the instructor for review. If the instructor requests to have the material exceeding the $50/$300 limits put on online reserve, the balance will be paid from the department's book budget.

• Fees are per-semester, and may change from one semester to the next.
• Fees vary widely from one publisher to another. The length of the article and the number of students enrolled in the class are also factors.
• We can't guarantee that we will be able to obtain permission for a reasonable fee. Some publishers may be unwilling to grant permission for any fee.
• It sometimes takes several weeks for the CCC to report what the fees will be, so please get these requests in early.

Reviewed 5/13/2013 by James Lutz .

In-library reserves

In-library reserves request form  ( To place a list of titles on reserve using the form please see our brief video .)

In-library items to be placed on the course reserves list can be works owned by an instructor or library-owned materials. Most physical reserves will be housed at the circulation desk on the first floor. Music and audio/visual materials will be housed at the music/media desk on the second floor.

Photocopies being placed on in-library reserve must:

• be in compliance with U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code)
• include clear source information/attribution.

In-library reserve items can have specified loan periods of 2 hours, 4 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours or 1 week. Library staff can guide you in choosing an appropriate loan period for your selected items.

Please contact the Circulation Department for assistance.

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Reviewed 5/13/2013 by James Lutz .

Online reserves

Online reserves request form

Online reserves on the course reserves list can be works owned by the instructor or library owned materials. To access online reserves, students must be currently enrolled at TCU and use their TCU ID number. By default, access is open to anyone with a valid TCU ID. You may request that access be restricted to students enrolled in the class. If the material is being placed on reserve for consecutive semesters with copyright permission from the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), access is always restricted to students enrolled in the class, due to the terms of our contract with the CCC.

Printed material is scanned in black and white. Reproduction of graphics and photographs is comparable to a photocopy. In order to accommodate off-campus users with modem connections, we try to keep the file sizes as small as possible, by processing scanned documents with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that converts as much as possible of the scanned image to coded text. This means that the documents may appear to consist of a combination of crisp text (where OCR was successful) and "fuzzier" text (where OCR was unable to convert the image to text). The library uses Adobe's Acrobat Capture which produces Adobe PDF files.

Unless you are emailing us a PostScript file, we will need a photocopy of the material. Please be sure the photocopy is of reasonable quality (not skewed diagonally on the page, and not blurry or smeared.)

The first time you place an item on reserve for a particular class please write down the full name of the course on the reserve request form. This is the course name that will appear on the course reserves list.

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Reviewed 5/13/2013 by James Lutz .