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Dear collective wisdom, Happy Friday! First, thank you to all who responded to my query from earlier this week about Fair Use and scanning practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am so grateful for your time and advice. Second, many of you also wrote to me requesting that I send a summary of responses, so I am here to deliver! I have quoted them below so you can get a feel for the gamut in play - it was a broad spectrum of opinions and policies! * "At Brown we are scanning entire books for course reserves if faculty request it and there is no electronic option. We always check first to make sure an ebook is not available before we scan the print. The scan is available by password only to students in the course. And we are doing this ONLY during the COVID crisis, when we are planning to have no print reserves. Ordinarily, we would limit the amount of a book that we scan." * "I am by no means a lawyer, but unless the work is no longer in copyright, copying an entire material would violate the "substantial portion of the work" clause. My understanding that 20% use was permissible: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html" * "I am also getting lots of requests for whole book scans. So far, my strategy is to try and find an e-version (not always possible as you) and / or to remind faculty and students of our fair use guidelines." * "We use a company to mediate copyright for us and they contact the publishers. Then they charge us the amount requested by the publishers. We charge the students. It is expensive, depending on the number of students in a class. You can go through Copyright Clearance as well. We are purchasing Overdrive and will purchase eBooks from them. The company we work with negotiated 30% of a book with publishers during Covid winter semester 2020, but it only lasted two months." * "Duke (and I assume other libraries) record full films and, as Karen mentioned, keep them within a pass-word protected Sakai site. Doing that with a book would seem to be a similar case (again during CoVID only). There's been much discussion about the fair use exception under emergency situations. I can't think of an emergency greater than CoVID: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10baTITJbFRh7D6dHVVvfgiGP2zqaMvm0EHHZYf2cBRk/preview?fbclid=IwAR3_DdQ6KJJb1I8oeQbDA1Mb7ulkYZJypP3tkZ2xB2mYDQQqj8Jm1VdE7JE#<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/docs.google.com/document/d/10baTITJbFRh7D6dHVVvfgiGP2zqaMvm0EHHZYf2cBRk/preview?fbclid=IwAR3_DdQ6KJJb1I8oeQbDA1Mb7ulkYZJypP3tkZ2xB2mYDQQqj8Jm1VdE7JE*__;Iw!!PhOWcWs!mikcmxYHVQpMvkFU0uMbB_NMsrrkLpONoZfjXbx3dLf5ho_2TyYigYTqu1MuT-s$>. In both these cases, it is required that the copy not only be taken down, but deleted after the class. I think you could do this." * "As an addendum, I don't buy the faculty argument that an entire book needs to be put on reserve. My experience with reserves is that students make surprisingly little use of them, ever in required readings. I suspect faculty just don't know. Since partial scans of material are allowable (and the law nowhere states an exact amount), would it be poss to scan a chapter, put that on reserve and then when subsequent chapters are added, older ones are deleted? A lot more work, for sure. I think some sort of negotiation with your faculty on whole-item e-reserves is probably warranted." * "For the spring semester - I said - Too Bad Copy Right. I did digitize some of our most popular text for the students to use remotely. I felt that since it was such a short notice and the books were not available digitally I was in my right to say educational fair use. However, I don't feel that way for the fall semester. With all summer for faculty to plan for a fall semester that will be completely online, I feel we have had enough time to know that a book will not be available to use - and equal time to push the faculty to choose another book that is an Ebook. (Easier said then done I am sure). I have been working with my staff to try to help sway faculty to do just this - but we have hit a few roadblocks. One or two faculty have dug in their heels and are crying to their Deans. I might tell them to check the book out and "you do what you want to do." But the library will not break the law. If they choose to scan the whole book on their time - fine. The library avoids the trouble and we don't have to sit there and scan a whole book." * "We also have a program that uses a very specialized set of study exam books that we cannot digitize and are not available as eBooks. Each book is $300 and there are about 7 in the series. The publisher will not allow the books to be access digitally and if we were to digitize them there is no way I could prevent students from downloading them and posting them somewhere. I could just see some real problems with this. I am planning to meet with the program heads about this issue. We think this impacts less than 10 students. I might - and this is a big might - let those students make appointments to come to campus to scan or photo copy what they need. I just don't see any other way we can help them." Best, and be well, Leah Leah Sherman Visual & Performing Arts Librarian Florida State University Libraries 116 Honors Way Tallahassee, FL 32306 From: Leah Sherman Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 12:06 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: A question about making book scans + Fair Use during COVID Dear Collective Wisdom, I hope you are all safe and well! I am writing to ask how your institution is handling scanning requests during the COVID pandemic. In particular, I am interested to know how you are responding to requests to scan entire books, especially in an instance where the book in question is only available in print. Are you filling such requests and if so, are you using Fair Use as your argument? Just to give a little context, at FSU we currently have 2 services in place while our library spaces remain closed to the public: 1) we are doing a curbside pick up for physical books from our collection for individual check out, and, 2) we are offering to scan articles and portions of books from our collections, either for individual use or to upload into an instructor's Canvas course site as an e-course reserve (we will not be resuming physical course reserves this fall, regardless of whether or not the physical library building reopens to patrons). Unsurprisingly, our Arts and Humanities disciplines have begun asking for scans of entire books, and in the Arts most of these requests are for titles that are only available in print (no e-book is available and they have not already been digitized in Hathi or Google Books, etc.) Even after speaking with some faculty about reproduction restrictions, they still feel strongly that the entire content of these titles is crucial to their instruction, tests, and research assignments this fall and they do not think a selection of chapters will be sufficient. With this in mind, and with my earlier points that we will not be resuming physical (in-person) course reserves (so course-wide access to the content would be otherwise unavailable) and that the scanned versions would only be accessible behind a login (and not made freely available so as to negatively affect market value), I am inclined to say that there is a case here for a Fair Use argument in order to indeed scan and upload the full text into Canvas after all. So TL;DR: are you getting similar requests to make scans of entire print-only books from your faculty and if so, what is your response? Why? Thanks for any and all thoughts! I appreciate every one of you, Leah Leah Sherman Visual & Performing Arts Librarian Florida State University Libraries 116 Honors Way Tallahassee, FL 32306 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] For information about joining ARLIS/NA see: http://www.arlisna.org/membership/join-arlisna Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.arlisna.org Questions may be addressed to list owner (Judy Dyki) at: [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~