A number of years back I pitched a project at UC Berkeley, of all
places, to do a "scan on the fly" project to scan tables of contents
and indexes of books returned from circulation. I even prototyped a
system for the indexing and display of the resulting pages, with
filenames derived from the barcode number and automatic links into the
catalog record for the item. The management at the time, in their
infinite wisdom, decided to put their resources elsewhere.

I still believe that such a project could provide a good deal of value
and would be defensible under current copyright law, but then I am
completely unqualified to even have an opinion about it.
Roy

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ILL at most institutions does not keep scanned copies for future patrons,
> not even in a database that's not "publically searchable."
>
> To do so would be of highly questionable legality with regard to copyright.
> As would be this plan, alas.
>
> You can easily violate copyright just sharing within the (eg) university
> community, or even just among librarians, it does not need to be 'publicly
> searchable' to violate copyright.
>
>
> On 4/25/2012 2:20 PM, Ross Singer wrote:
>>
>> I am not sure this would be as much of a problem as long as it's not a
>> publicly searchable database (that is, people can't browse scans are there
>> and choose them).  Of course, this restriction makes it difficult to
>> envision how the UI would work, but something triggered by an exact match
>> should work.
>>
>> Then again, I am not a lawyer.
>>
>> -Ross.
>>
>> On Apr 25, 2012, at 2:05 PM, Andrew Shuping wrote:
>>
>>> What type of pages from books are you talking about?  Like reference
>>> materials, histories, biographies, fiction?  Because while my first
>>> thought is that would be an interesting idea, my immediate second
>>> thought is that publishers and authors would never allow it to happen
>>> because of Copyright.  Even in ILL land we can't keep scanned pages
>>> for a long period of time due to copyright restrictions.
>>>
>>> Also this sounds a lot like the Google Books project...
>>>
>>> Andrew Shuping
>>> Interlibrary Loan/Emerging Technologies&  Services Librarian
>>>
>>> Jack Tarver Library
>>> Robert Frost - "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned
>>> about life: it goes on."
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Michael Lindsey
>>> <[log in to unmask]>  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
>>
>>
>