Electronic Reserved Reading Shelf

The THWS Library supports lecturers in making their reserved reading shelves electronically available. Required essays or small parts of books (e.g. single chapters) are digitised by the Library and uploaded to the respective e-learning course. For articles from e-journals or for e-books, the URL is published.

Digitisation request

What is an electronic reserved reading shelf?
How can you register an electronic reserved reading shelf?
What are important dates and deadlines?
What kind of material can be included into the electronic reserved reading shelf?
FAQ, materials and documents regarding copyright law in higher education teaching (Prof. Dr. Achim Förster, THWS)

What is an electronic reserved reading shelf?

An electronic reserved reading shelf makes essays an small parts of literature (e.g. single chapters from text books) electronically available to course participants. Via the Internet, access to digitised texts is possible from everywhere. An access key, however, ensures that only participants registered for this course are able to access the electronic reserved reading shelf. Unrestricted access is not permissible due to copyright regulations.
If you want to add articles from e-journals/e-books to the reserved reading shelf that are already available within the Library, you can provide the link to the respective source. If necessary, the Library staff will help you finding the correct link. Licensed e-resources can be accessed from within the THWS network or - by members of THWS - via external access.

How can you register an electronic reserved reading shelf?

For every course offered on the e-learning platform, you can request the digitisation of literature for an electronic reserved reading shelf by the Library.
If your course is not yet registered on e-learning, please contact the faculty’s staff responsible for e-learning.

At any time, teaching staff of THWS can request the digitisation of literature for an electronic reserved reading shelf. Please enter the information about articles or book chapters that are to be enclosed in your electronic reserved reading shelf into the digitisation request for Würzburg or the digitisation request for Schweinfurt and send it to us.
We will digitise the required literature and upload the files to your respective e-learning course. Please note: To be able to upload the digitised literature to the correct e-learning course, it is necessary for us to get the correct course number and course title.
We will send you an e-mail as soon as we uploaded the files.
If you have printouts of texts (e.g. copies of articles), please give them to us.

What are important dates and deadlines?

Please let us know your digitisation needs in time. We make every effort to complete your orders promptly. In particular at the beginning of a semester, we would appreciate getting digitisation orders well in advance.

What kind of material can be included into the electronic reserved reading shelf?

On 1 March 2018 a new copyright law came into force that updated legal provisions concerning education and research. The new law is supposed to facilitate the use of works protected by copyright for research and teaching.

Legal basis for electronic reserved reading shelves is § 60 a of the new law (Urheberrechts-Wissensgesellschafts-Gesetz, UrhWissG).

According to this, e-learning systems may make use of the following:

• up to 15% of a published work (book)
• figures
• individual articles from specialist journals and scientific journals
• other works on a small scale (texts up to 25 pages, music and videos up to a length of 5 minutes)
• out-of-print works (not available via book traders for two years)

For electronic reserved reading shelves the following is not allowed:

• articles from newspapers or journals that are no explicit specialist publications (but so called “Kiosk magazines”)

The preliminary check as to whether a license offer from a publisher is available will no longer be necessary with the new regulation.

Digitisation and provision of entire books is not possible due to copyright law. Please make sure in advance that your required texts do not exceed the limits defined by copyright law and that no third party rights are violated. We are only allowed to upload published texts or your own texts (where you possess publishing rights) to the electronic reserved reading shelf. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

The law provides for a lump sum payment for this use.