Make items available for students

If your students need to read one chapter of a book, we can digitise a single chapter (or up to 10% if that’s more than one chapter) without paying for additional online access, if we already own a copy. We can also digitise journal articles that we only have in print.

Please enter the full chapter reference into your reading list and tag the reference “OCR” (Online Course Readings). Give as much information as you can so we can fulfil your request as quickly as possible.

This is subject to the terms of the University’s CLA licence; some publishers are excluded.

We digitise all chapters and articles marked as “Core”, as long as they comply with licensing restrictions.

What can be digitised

The OCR team checks each request for digitisation against the list of criteria set down by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) scanning licence.

In summary, we can scan:

• one chapter, article or 10% of the total pages (whichever is greatest) per book or journal issue
• only items owned by the University
• books or journals published in the UK or one of the 38 CLA approved international territories
• books or journals from US publishers that have opted in to the licence.

We cannot scan:

• newspaper articles (but a huge number of national and international newspapers are available online)
• items that are already available in digital format (unless you can make a strong case that the current digital version is unsuitable)
• items on the CLA’s exclusion lists
• books that students have recommended for purchase.

Conditions of digitisation

Scanning must be done by our "designated scanners", who are named on the University’s CLA licence.

All digitisation must come through the Online Course Readings service, unless otherwise agreed with the Library’s Copyright Officer.

If you want your students to read more than one chapter of a book, the whole book needs to be labelled Core or Student to Purchase, as scans provided by Online Course Readings cannot be used to substitute for the purchase of textbooks by students.

For further information, email the Online Course Readings team.

What happens once a request is made

When a digitisation request has been processed, eligible chapters and articles are scanned in PDF format. Scans are no longer uploaded to Minerva. They are only accessible via the module reading list.

Students can access these scans via the “View Online” link in the reading list.

Using the digitised items

You can use the same extract multiple times across different modules. However, please DO NOT copy material without contacting the Online Course Readings team, as this breaks the terms of the CLA licence.

Only students registered on the appropriate module may access the PDFs, but there is no limit on the number of times they can use them.

Compatibility with screen readers

We add optical character recognition to all our PDFs before putting them online (essentially changing them from images to text-based PDFs). The results of this are not 100% accurate, but it does mean the PDFs are compatible with screen readers.

If you know of a visually-impaired student on the course, please refer them to the University’s Transcription Service.