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Faculty FAQ

What are Course Reserves?

Reserves are supplemental materials and resources that professors have identified for use in a specific course. Use the Course Reserve Form to request items. The library will process your requests and put the link(s) into your Canvas course.

  • Electronic reserves:
    • Book chapter or small excerpt(s) from a book
    • Journal Articles
    • eBooks
    • A short story, essay, or short poem
    • A chart, graph, diagram, drawing, cartoon, or picture from a book, periodical or newspaper
    • Streaming Video (digitized materials or items on streaming platforms provided by the Library)
  • Streaming Media Conversion: Use the Streaming Media Request Form to make requests for converting video on physical media to streaming media for course reserves.

For more information, please see our course reserves policy.

General Questions About Course Reserves

Please use the Course Reserve Form for requesting items to be placed on reserve; both for items in the collection and those that need to be purchased. This includes streaming media available through one of our platforms (i.e. Kanopy) 

Streaming Media Form: Complete only when requesting to have a DVD/VHS digitized for streaming into your Canvas course.

Reserve requests should be submitted at least 2 weeks prior to the date the material is needed for use to help ensure timely access.

Additional items can be put on reserve anytime during the semester but should be submitted at least 2 weeks prior to the date the material is needed for use

Questions or concerns may be addressed to Pamela Scott (pscot1@uis.edu) in User Services or Stephen McMinn (hmcmi3@uis.edu) Director of Collections and Scholarly Communications.

Reserve requests should be submitted at least 2 weeks prior to the date the material is needed for use to ensure the Library has adequate time to process your request.

We encourage you to submit reserve requests as soon as possible to ensure that material is available to students when they need it.

However, there are a few exceptions:

  • Requests for a large number of materials may be completed in batches, with materials needed for the beginning of the semester scanned or placed on reserve first, followed by other materials.
  • If the library does not have current access to a requested item and we need to order it, the reserve request may take additional time to fulfill.
  • Around the beginning of the term and at the beginning of each semester, items may take longer to be processed due to high demand. We encourage you to make your requests as early as possible.

Due to copyright restrictions we can only scan 10% or one chapter of a book (depending on the work), or 1 article from a journal issue. Please note that these restrictions do not apply to electronic items in the Library's collection.

For detailed information, please see our Guidelines and Procedures for Copyright Compliance in the Use of Library Materials for Course Reserves