What is the Scanning for Teaching service?
Scanned and digitised documents are a great resource for students, especially for materials which are heavily used, difficult to access, or essential reading. As the new academic year approaches, you’ll probably be making final checks and amendments to your Blackboard Ultra modules, Reading Lists, and other learning materials. If you’re planning to use scanned material from books, journals, or other print resources make sure that you’re providing the best quality materials to your students and complying with copyright legislation by using the Student & Library Service’s Scanning for Teaching service. Managed by SLS’s Research Support team, the service is the only way tutors can make scanned content available in a legally compliant way.
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Only scanned extracts produced by the Library team allow teaching staff to share material in line with copyright regulations. The team make sure each scan is provided legally by taking care of all the necessary licence checks and reporting, which ensures that authors and publishers are properly paid for their work. Breaches of the licence can have serious implications.
When you place a request for a book chapter, journal article or other print materials to be made available electronically for teaching purposes the team checks the University’s existing holdings and can then either recommend the purchase of an electronic version, or scan from our print resources.
Licence compliance is only one reason to use the service, there are other benefits too. The team use specialist equipment to create high quality scans. These are searchable and machine-readable pdfs, making the materials accessible for all students.
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Teaching staff can ensure their students are able to make use of the same resources as their peers, whether they are able to access campus, are distance learners, have accessibility needs, or print disabilities. It also eases the pressure on finite print resources if a whole cohort is required to use the same key extract. The team provides a stable link that you can add to your Reading List, module, or any other learning materials, so students can simply click through to their digitised reading.
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Using the Scanning for Teaching service also means that we can use that data to produce reports, such as number of downloads per extract, to see how actively engaged the students are for each course. Please get in touch with the team at SLSResearchSupport@tees.ac.uk if you’d like to learn more.
Useful links:
Scanning for Teaching libguide
Creating Content in Blackboard Ultra