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London Metropolitan University

Academic Staff Guides

Staff guides on utilising Library services, support, and resources

Digitisation of library resources for teaching

The library can provide digitised copies of book chapters and journal articles as PDFs added to your reading list. This is particularly helpful to students when the library may not have multiple copies of printed items.

A digitisation can be requested for a single chapter or up to 10% of a book. (which ever is greater) Where the library does not have access to either a physical or digital copy of a requested resource, we can request a scan via the British Library.

We are subject to limitations relating to copyright, and not all publishers and jurisdictions are covered. When you submit a request, Library staff will check the availability of the item for you.

NOTE: access arrangements to the physical collections have yet to be made clear and or the possibility of further lockdowns in the future cannot be ruled out, so we can offer no guarantees over the supply of digitisations.

Requesting a digitised chapter or article

This video (50s) shows you how to request a digitised chapter or article.

Step-by-step

  • Locate the parent resource within one of your reading lists and click on the three vertical dots to the right to select 'request digitisation'.

Selecting the request digitisation item

 

  • Complete the form and the system will carry out a series of checks for copyright compliance.
    • Select the appropriate resource type, either Book or Journal Article.
    • Enter the bibliographic details for the item you wish to be scanned and click 'next'.
    • The start and end date fields will be fixed to cover the duration of the academic year. 
    • 'Needed by' - you can enter a date to indicate to the scanning team that the digitisation will be required for teaching by a certain date.
    • Enter the course name, course code and student numbers (this may already be populated based on the module data)
    • The system displays your name and email address.
  • Click 'submit'.

Request digitisation form

 

The CLA Copyright Permissions Checker works in the background to ensure that the requested item can be digitised. This takes a matter of seconds.

If the digitisation is approved the Scanning Team will create the scan and add it to the reading list system so it links with the item entry on your reading list. Scans are no longer emailed to the lecturer to be put directly onto Weblearn.

You will receive a system-generated email to inform you when the scan has been added or if it had to be rejected for reasons of copyright.

As soon as the request is made the status will change to 'Digitisation pending'.

Digitisation pending example