Reading Lists
Digitisation Service for Staff
The library provides a streamlined digitisation service that ensures the university meets all legal requirements, as well as offering easy access for your students through their online reading lists.
What can be digitised?
The most common items to be digitised are sections from books or journal articles. However, in order to digitise any material some conditions must be met:
- It must have originally been published in the UK or US
- It must not be on the excluded publishers list
- A copy must be owned by the Library or by a School – we must be able to produce this copy if requested by the CLA. A personal copy does not meet this condition.
- It is a copyright fee paid item from the British Library.
In addition, there must be a record kept of every item that is digitised and made available to students. This is sent to the CLA every year and is a legal requirement of the license.
How much can be digitised?
- A chapter from a book (or 10% whatever is greater)
- An article from a journal
- A whole paper from a set of conference proceedings
- A short story or poem from an anthology (not exceeding 10 pages)
- A whole report from a single case of a judicial proceedings
- Whole page images or embedded images may also be scanned
If you need more than this the library will investigate if additional chapters etc. can be made available. If this is possible there may be a cost involved.
Requesting a digitisation
Please contact readinglists@rgu.ac.uk with the following details:
- Item information
- Course name
- Module number
- Number of students on the module
- Date when the item is required for
The library will check if the item you require can be made available as a digital copy under the CLA License. We'll then scan it, create the audit records required, and make the item available through your online reading list.
Please note that if your requested item doesn't comply with the license the library will investigate if we can gain permission directly from the publisher for the item to be made available digitally.
What is the timescale for making items available?
If the item is available (either on the shelves or electronically) and covered by the License, it will normally take a couple of working days. If we need to get hold of the item, either by recalling it from a borrower or purchasing copies, it will take longer.
If the material is not covered, the timescale depends on the individual publisher. Some publishers will not grant permission for digitisation.
Can academic staff undertake scanning?
Only library staff are designated as authorised to make copies under the Copyright Licensing Agency License and as such will take responsibility for compliance of the digitised copies they deal with and meeting the legal reporting requirements.
Academic staff cannot digitise material and add PDFs directly to modules on Moodle.
Adding other reading material to Moodle
There may be times when you want to upload journal articles, books, reports etc. that you have found in databases or on websites to your module area on Moodle.
Please be cautious
The copyright and license agreements we have with publishers do not allow for uploading of the PDF/Word versions of articles, books, etc. on CampusMoodle. Instead, you should provide a link to where the material can be accessed and this can easily be done through the online reading lists.
You can only upload the document on Moodle if there is an explicit statement/license allowing re-distribution.
This also applies to materials openly available online.
Links to materials can be made available through the reading list system. Alternatively, we can provide you with links which work on and off campus.
Final reminder
If you would like to make any digitised material available to your students it should be done via the library’s digitisation service.
Library staff are authorised to make copies, CLA checks must be performed, and records of all digitisations must be kept and submitted to CLA each year.
If you have any queries please contact readinglists@rgu.ac.uk.