Research & Assignments

The Course Reserve Collection is located at the Library Services Desk and is staffed all hours the library is open. The collection consists of materials owned by Maxwell Library as well as faculty members' personal books.

• For Course Reserve information, call 508.531.1392

Please note: Maxwell Library reserves the right to bill and/or block any accounts that have long overdue items. 

• Faculty must please complete a Course Reserve Request Form for all items to be placed on Course Reserve:
• Course Reserve Requests may be submitted any time during the semester and will be processed in the order in which they are received.
• For scanned copies of chapters and articles, please contact the Faculty Teaching & Technology Center for assistance with scanning/uploading to Blackboard. Please read the library’s Copyright/Fair Use Guidelines for Course Reserves, which is available online (below) and at the Library Services Desk.
• Material belonging to other libraries, whether obtained personally or through Interlibrary Loan, and videos obtained from an outside source (such as Netflix) may not be placed on Course Reserve.

Copyright/Fair Use Guidelines for Course Reserves

Copyrighted materials made available via Course Reserves are for use in class and for course study outside of class (including in the library). The use of copyrighted materials in all formats, including the creation, online delivery, and use of digital copies of copyrighted materials submitted for course reserve, must be in compliance with U.S. Copyright law.

The Library’s policy concerning photocopies of copyrighted materials on Course Reserve is defined by the Copyright Act (17 U.S. Code, §107 and 108). No one should post content consisting of copyrighted material or portions of copyrighted material without first:

• Determining that the content falls within the public domain,
• Obtaining permission from the copyright owner, or
• Determining, after a reasonable analysis, that the content is a fair use for which permission is not required.

The 1997 Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) established guidelines for educators incorporating portions of lawfully acquired copyrighted works into their educational programs. These are guidelines only, and not mandated by law – they provide a starting point for assessing whether your use of material qualifies as Fair Use. The recommended guidelines are:

• No more than 10% or 3 minutes (whichever is less) of motion-based works;
• No more than 10% or 30 seconds (whichever is less) of a song or video;
• No more than 10% of a text; and
• Entire photographs or illustrations may be used provided that no more than 10% or 15 images (whichever is less) come from any one source.

Fair Use allows limited use of copyrighted materials for educational and research purposes. The statute outlines four factors that should be assessed in determining whether a use is a Fair Use. These are:

• Purpose and character of your use
• Nature of the copyrighted work
• Amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
• Effect of the use upon the potential market.

The test is, intentionally, fact dependent. You need to look at each use individually to determine if it is a Fair Use.

Linking is not Copying

Maxwell Library provides access to a number of databases and electronic journals by subscription agreement with vendors such as EBSCO, Gale, JSTOR, Project Muse, and ProQuest. Licensing agreements vary in addressing whether or not content may be downloaded and posted to an e-reserves system or learning management system (such as Blackboard). We strongly suggest that faculty LINK to database or e-journal content rather than copying and re-posting the content.