Four students sitting in the library in front of books

July 6, 2017, by Pauline

Get your course readings digitised – try our scanning service

Did you know that the library provides a scanning service for teaching staff?

We can scan chapters and journal articles from our print collections for your reading list. It is a great way to make selected readings more accessible for your students.

Why use the library scanning service?

It allows you to take advantage of the University’s Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) licence. The licence is the main way to legally provide scanned readings without direct permission from the copyright holder, or an open licence e.g. Creative Commons.

  • Scans are produced to a high standard and are made searchable (OCR), making them more accessible to students.
  • Scans are uploaded to a central CLA Digital Content Store, and links to the scans can be made available on your course online reading list and Moodle page.
  • The library takes care of all licence checks and reporting to the CLA ensuring scans are legally provided and compliant with the licence.
  • Scans can normally be produced within two weeks of request.

Please note that scanning under the CLA Licence may only be done by the Library Scanning Service to ensure scans meet the licence terms. So let us do all the hard work for you!

What can be scanned?

We can scan book chapters, journal articles, images, poems, short stories and other extracts from print works. The licence does not cover printed music, maps, charts, newspapers or unpublished materials. Some publishers and works may not be covered by the licence but the library will carry out the necessary checks on your behalf.

The amount per module from a single work is whichever is the greater of 10%, or one book chapter or one article from a journal issue.

How to request scans

  • Email requests to scanningrequests@nottingham.ac.uk
    Provide full bibliographic details of the extract(s), the module name and number, and when the scan is required for.
  • Use the Online reading lists system
    Add a library note (“For digitisation”) to each extract and publish the list to submit it for review.

Requests can be made throughout the year. Scans will normally take up to two weeks to produce. However, at peak times to help us ensure scans are available for the start of each semester we ask that requests reach us by 1 August for Semester 1 and 15 December for Semester 2. Any requests received after these dates are still welcome but may not be ready for the start of semester – although we will certainly try!

If you have any existing scanned extracts that no longer have direct copyright permission, just get in touch and we can get them checked and recorded under the CLA licence. Where necessary we can also improve the quality and searchability of scans to make them more accessible for your students.

Further information

See our Scanning Service webpage for further details of the service.

For further help or advice you can email: scanningrequests@nottingham.ac.uk

Posted in CopyrightOnline resourcesTeaching and Learning