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), 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.

What can be digitised

The Acquisitions & Reading Lists 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 or 10% of the total pages (whichever is greatest) per book per module 
• two articles or 10% of the total pages (whichever is greatest) per journal issue per module. Or where the issue is dedicated to a theme, up to a whole issue 
• only items owned by the University. We may be able to source copyright fee paid copies of some chapters/articles not held at Leeds 
• most books or journals published in the UK or one of the 32 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)
• some items that are already available in digital format
• items on the CLA’s exclusion lists.

Conditions of digitisation

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

All digitisation must be managed by the Acquisitions & Reading Lists team.

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

For further information, email the Acquisitions and Reading Lists 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 Acquisitions & Reading lists 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.