Local to Global: E-Reserves at UC Berkeley

Providing course reserves in the University Library has been an important safety net for generations of students. But the sudden closure of the physical library in March 2020 abruptly ended this service. And when the university decided that students could participate from anywhere in the world, students with the financial resources to buy their books — but living in countries where Amazon doesn’t deliver, and the local bookstore doesn’t stock the titles they need — joined financially challenged students in needing e-access to required readings and videos. The Library had an opportunity to rise to the challenge and provide required materials to all students in a fully virtual global environment.

Join us for a discussion of how the Library adapted its service model, through a complex and creative mix of in-house scanning, controlled digital lending via HathiTrust Digital Library, reformatting to streaming video, and licensing for all formats, which helped provide resources to not only UC Berkeley users, but faculty and students across all the ten UC campuses. We will also discuss some of the challenges we’ve encountered to opening access to scholarship — overly restrictive digital rights management (DRM), exclusive licensing, and even some resistance to open educational resources (OERs).

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