What materials may be placed on reserve at the library?
Books, pamphlets, periodical articles, videos, CDs, government documents, and microforms are some of the types of materials that may be placed on reserve at the library for your class.
Copyright Documents & Forms
Materials on Reserve at the Library: Information for Faculty
- When to Use In-Library Reserves
- Submitting Items for In-Library Reserves
- Time for Processing Reserve Course Materials
- Reserve Policy Statement
Course Reserves exist to facilitate student access to materials needed for course assignments and short-term projects. Due to the limited space available for reserves operations, the Libraries cannot provide long-term storage of books or readings nor act as a clearinghouse for syllabi or course announcements. Books and readings are removed from reserves and returned to the stacks or the professor at the end of each semester.
When to Use In-Library Reserves
You will need to use in-library reserves whenever you are using a substantial portion of a book, periodical, recording, or other material in a course. Materials in copyright may be posted on electronic reserves only if they fall within fair use or you have received permission from the copyright holder. Otherwise, we will need to put the book, recording, or other material on in-library reserves. For more information see the Copyright Guidelines.
Submitting Items for In-Library Reserves
If you wish us to pull materials in the library yourself, the Libraries provide a form, Course Reserve Materials, that we recommend using to list your reserve items. You can download this form or request a copy at the library Services Desk. We will also accept computer-generated forms you create provided they follow the same basic format. We ask that the list
- be printed on 8 1/2" x 11" paper and double spaced
- supply the professor's name and college, the course number and title, the semester, and the loan period (2-hour, 2-day or 7-day checkout)
- include the author, title and call number of each item
Please be sure the list is legible and complete. We will not look up call numbers for you. Please leave at least one line between entries for legibility. If you wish, you may e-mail your list to
Photocopied materials: You are responsible for all photocopying connected with reserve readings and for complying with current copyright law regarding fair use. If you are unsure of your obligations and rights under fair use, the University of Texas has an excellent copyright web site. More extensive web sites are maintained by Indiana University and Stanford University. Another good primer on copyright issues is Copyright Essentials for Librarians and Educators by Kenneth Crews (Chicago: American Library Association, 2000) available in the Honnold Reference stacks (KF 2995 C74 2000).
Notice of the copyright holder is a requirement for fair use of copyrighted material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. To meet this requirement, you may copy both the title page and the page displaying the copyright notice from a book or journal and include these with each copy put on reserve. Alternatively, you may download and fill out the Copyright Notice form, also available at the Services Desk attach a copy to each photocopied reserve item. We cannot post materials lacking the copyright notice. If you cannot identify the copyright holder, contact the Reserves staff and we will attempt to find this information for you. Given our small number of staff we cannot do this for a large number of readings, and it may delay the processing of the item, possibly by several days.
Personal copies: We will place personal copies of books and other materials on reserve if you ask us to do so. We may place a barcode and other identifying labels on a book; if you wish us not to, please inform the Reserves staff when you submit the item. Normally we return materials to the faculty by intercampus mail at the end of the semester. If you would prefer to pick up your materials, let us know and we will hold them for you. Because students may use these items quite heavily, we cannot guarantee their condition when they are returned to you.
Time for Processing Reserve Course Materials
Please plan your schedule for submitting course lists and materials according to the guidelines below. Although materials may be submitted any time the library is open, they are processed only Monday-Friday.
At the start of the semester (2 weeks before classes start until a month after) processing time will run at least 10-15 working days. If you need your readings on reserve the first week of school, and we must pull books or catalog photocopies, we strongly urge you to submit your course materials a month before classes start. If you have a large number of items, please indicate which ones will be needed first. At other times
- If you provide all materials (including the Libraries' copies of books): Reserves staff will have the items ready for checkout in 2-3 working days.
- If Reserves staff retrieve all Libraries' materials: Reserves staff will have the items ready as soon as possible. If books need to be recalled, this will likely add a week to the processing time; searches for missing materials may take much longer.
- If the Libraries must purchase materials: Be aware that book vendors often require a minimum of 8 weeks to process and deliver orders. While we can sometimes rush-order a book and have ready it in a couple of weeks, this is not always possible with academic press titles, and rarely possible if the book was published abroad. To avoid disappointment, we urge you to let us know well in advance if materials need to be purchased for your course.
Reserve Policy Statement (optional)
Often students come to check out reserves without their library cards or they misunderstand the policies governing renewal of reserve items. For these reasons, we have composed the following statement that we would like you to include in the syllabi of your courses that require use of reserve materials. Please feel free to insert this statement verbatim:
The Reserve Desk requires that you present your current student ID card at checkout. In addition, because of demand by other users, renewal of Reserve items is never automatic. For hourly reserve items we require that you physically present the item at the time you request renewal; 2-day or 7-day items may be renewed once by phone, with the understanding that renewal may be denied if other patrons have requested the item.