The short answer is: it depends.
The Claremont Colleges Library adheres to the Library best practices regarding Copyright and Fair Use and recognizes the importance of Fair Use to teaching.
We recommend that it is in your best interest to first attempt to procure a legal copy of materials to provide to students in your courses. The library provides legal copies can come from an institutionally subscribed or licensed resource, or you could get permission from the author or copyright holder. Other ways you might consider are purchasing an education copy, finding materials in the public domain, or using a resource that has a Creative Commons license.
The librarian in your subject area can help you identify and acquire e-books for course materials if one is available for the library to purchase. If the titles you want to use are available in the library's online collections we advise you to provide a link to the materials using the permanent URL.
In many cases there may not be an e-version of the materials you want to use. This is especially common for textbooks as a significant portion of textbook publishers do not provide electronic purchasing options to academic libraries since most textbook publishers make their profits by selling e-textbooks directly to students.
If your textbook or course materials are not available in e-versions, you still have several options. Under Fair Use and the TEACH Act (especially for online courses) you may scan or copy a "reasonable or limited" portion of the textbook or materials for your course and your students (either an online scan or printed out hard copy).
You can post copies of scanned materials (under the Teach Act Section 108) in the following manner:
- Share only what is needed for the purpose of instruction for that day's lesson.
- Limit access to students enrolled in your course via a closed system such as Canvas (not Box, Google Drive or via email)
- Somewhere in the system that you store the materials provide a notice to students that: "The materials on this course are only for the use of students enrolled in this course for purposes associated with this course and may not be retained or further disseminated."
