As you know we have purchased a large number of ebooks from academic publishers including those from Canadian University Presses and prominent US University Presses.
We are actively working to find a way to include information on use restrictions in our catalogue records. However, until this capability is enabled we do not have way to indicate in the catalogue single use restrictions for ebooks.
This means that a faculty member may have assigned an ebook as course reading without knowing that online access is limited to one user at a time. When this happens please explain to the faculty why some ebooks are single user (I’ve included sample text at the end of this message) and please suggest the following to help solve the problem immediately:
1. Go old school with print reserves. We continue to buy print editions of ebooks so, unless we are very unlucky, the print version should be should be available at the library and that can be put on STL. If we do not have the print edition, please let the Selector in the area know immediately and we will rush order the title for reserve.
2. Under the Copyright Act's fair dealing provision, 10% or one chapter (whatever is greater) of a title can be scanned and uploaded to Blackboard. For more information on the University of Toronto's Fair Dealing Guidelines, please visit: http://www.provost.utoronto.ca/Assets/Provost+Digital+Assets/26.pdf
3. Recommend faculty use the Libraries' expanded Syllabus Service. In an effort to ensure that assigned course reading material is copyright compliant, Library staff will review syllabi and provide material both under the fair dealing provision and by purchasing copyright clearance through the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office at no cost to the instructor. Please send any questions about this service or copyright compliance to copyright@library.utoronto.ca
4. Send a message to Weijing who will ask the vendor about opening up access (this will come at a cost). It is entirely possible that no more access is available for sale, in fact this is exactly why the publisher made that ebook single user – they did not want to miss out on the revenue generated when a book is adopted for classroom use -- so suggest options 1 through 3, but make no promises (other than we will check) about option 4.
And, please always feel free to contact me yourselves or refer a faculty member to me.
Thank you,
CT
SAMPLE TEXT TO FACULTY MEMBER:
To support the teaching and research needs of this vast university, we try to license ebooks without concurrent user limits (and the majority of ebooks licensed have no user limit) but it's not always possible to do so due to publisher restrictions and cost. At the moment, many university presses have restricted use for titles they believe have a high probability of being adopted for classroom use. For these titles, it is only possible to purchase a license for 1 concurrent user. We recognize this is not ideal but of the two options we had (license for 1 user or no access at all), we chose to go the former.
The ebook market is still very fluid and changes quite rapidly. Some publishers, especially university presses, are very concerned about providing wide access to their books in electronic format through libraries, as they see this will lead to significant decline of their revenue. We'll continue to work with the publishers to ensure the needs of our faculty and students are met and are working to find ways to alert faculty to use limits in the catalogue. In the meantime we have the following suggestions to help.
Caitlin Tillman
Associate Chief Librarian for Collections and Materials Management