Michael,

I had this thought years ago as a way of slowly making microform collections "relevant" again.  As people find things they need in microforms collections (which, admittedly, isn't terribly often anymore), scanning the things they find, briefly adding some metadata about them and keeping a copy for themselves (emailed to themselves or whatever) and a copy is saved locally which could then be cleaned up by student assistants or something.  The metadata/scans go into a database that's part of the larger discovery system and then all of this stuff is somewhat useful again (maybe).

-Ross.

On Apr 25, 2012, at 1:36 PM, Michael Lindsey wrote:

> A colleague posed an interesting idea: patrons scan book pages to deliver to themselves by email, flash drive, etc.
> What if the scans didn't disappear from memory, but went into a repository so the next patron looking for that passage didn't have to jockey the flatbed scanner?
> 
> * Patron scans library barcode at the scanner
> * The system says, "I have these pages available in cache."
>     o Patron's project overlaps with the cache and saves time in the
>       scanning, or
>     o Patron needs different pages, scans them and contributes to the
>       cache
> 
> Now imagine a consortium of some sort where when the patron scans the barcode, the system takes a hop via the ISBN number in the record to reach out to a cache developed between a number of libraries.
> I know there are a number of cases where this may not apply, like loose-leaf publications in binders that get updated, etc.  And I'm sure there are discussions around how to handle copyright, fair use, etc.
> Do we as a community already have a similar endeavor in place?
> 
> Michael Lindsey
> UC Berkeley Law Library