Instructions for Submitting Documents to E-Reserves

What is Electronic Reserve?

A way to give your students 24-hour access to your syllabi, notes, presentations, supplemental readings, sample tests, sample papers, style sheets, spreadsheets, websites you recommend, scanned documents, images, etc.

How Does it Work?

By going to our E-Reserve Home Page at http://nwtcres.wctc.edu/, students can search for this material by instructor name, course name, or course number. Then they can view the information, save it, or print it out. If they do not have the appropriate software on their computers, they can download the necessary viewers for free.

Why Put Documents on Electronic Reserve?

This system has several advantages over placing documents on the shared public drive or on a course web site:

  1. Students have access from home and can get the information for all of their classes from one web site.
  2. The Library staff and Faculty can load documents, set visibility dates, and archive the documents from any computer with the Internet.
  3. The E-Reserve system works directly with BlackBoard. So you can put all of your documents for your traditional classes and online classes in one spot.
  4. It has a built-in copyright management system to help seek permission for copyright-protected materials.
    5. It allows instructors to take full advantage of the “fair use” copyright exemption by password-protecting materials so that only their students can view them. Faculty members can choose their own passwords and inform their students.
  5. Faculty members can get statistics showing how often students are viewing their documents.

What are Faculty Members Putting on Electronic Reserve?

How Can I Submit Documents for Electronic Reserve?

Faculty who complete 1 hour of "Super Faculty E-Reserve training" can create and manage their own e-reserve course pages online. Others need to follow the steps below.

  1. Complete an Electronic Reserve Request Form. Send the form to Ellen Bricco in the Library.
    1. You only need to submit one form to set up each class in electronic reserves. We use the information on the form to put your name in the system and add the class information. We use the item information to know what you want us to call the document and whether any copyright restrictions apply.
    2. After we set up your course, you will only need to submit additional forms if new material is copyright protected and we need your signature. If the new material is not copyright protected, you can simply submit the document (see below) and tell us what course it is for and what name you want it to be called. If you want your documents organized into folders, please also specify which folder the document goes into.
  2. Submit the document to Ellen Bricco in the Library.
    1. Documents that are already in electronic form can be emailed as attachments to Ellen or submitted to the Library on disk.
      1. Materials may be submitted in the following formats: Acrobat (.pdf), Excel (.xls), Word (.doc), PowerPoint (.ppt), text (.txt or .rtf), images (.gif or .jpg) and .html
      2. If your document is on a shared drive, you can simply give us the name and location of the document, and we will access it from there. However, it you make changes to that document at a later date, you will have to inform us to replace the old version on electronic reserve.
    2. Links to web sites can be added by writing the complete URL on the Request Form or by adding the URL in an email to Ellen.
  3. Printed documents to be scanned by the Library staff should be submitted with the Request Form
    1. When supplying a physical copy that must be scanned into electronic form, the following tips will improve the quality of the finished product and will expedite processing:
      1. Supply clean, first generation copies with no black margin or bring in the original.
      2. Be sure that all of the text is on the copy
      3. Make sure that the author and title are clearly marked with full citation on the first page (you can write in on there if it is missing)

How Does Copyright Affect Electronic Reserve?

Copyright regulations do not permit placing the same copyright protected materials on reserve for more than one term per year without obtaining copyright permission or paying for a license (this does not apply to materials created by the instructor). Instructors should meet with the Library Manager to obtain copyright permission or to discuss any copyright issues. In many cases, the Library may already own a license for the requested materials.

If you have any questions about Electronic Reserve, please contact Kim LaPlante at ext. 5487 or Ellen Bricco at ext. 5493.