This is in reference to the recent discussions on using Lis-Forum for inter-library loan requests or such activities. I myself, in the past, had questioned whether Lis-forum can be used for requesting journal articles irrespective of copy right related problems. Such emails, enquiring availability of a journal, have again and again proved : 1. We Indian librarians either have failed to develop subjectwise online union catalogue of journal holdings of various libraries or not put effort to update the exisiting catalogues or Certain networks who have taken such initiatives are not able to get data from all the libraries. 2. If available, may be we are not aware of such online union catalogues. ( any such information may be sent to the forum by the members ) 3. May be, we individually have not tried enough to collect journal holding list of various libraries or such data in electronic form, in our area Or Libraries do not offer such lists/data on requests. It is time for us think of creating such exhaustive online union catalogues or updating such online catalgoues and to think more seriously about sharing our resources. However, we at IGIDR have taken initiative to develope an online Union catalogue of major business and social sci libraries of India. So far 14 libraries have contributed the data and the compilation is now available from out site. I once again request the librarians of Business and Social sci libraries to contribute their journal holding data and to actively participate in resource sharing activities. I appreciate if this message can be sent to other lis-forums also. If sending electronic file over email is against copyright law, sending our members to other libraries and taking a photocopy for fare academic purpose will not be a violation. We have been doing this since ages. Most libraries in our country have a Photocopier! thanks g.k.manjunath ************************************************** CHIEF LIBRARIAN INDIRA GANDHI INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH FILM CITY ROAD ( GEN.VAIDYA MARG ) SANTOSH NAGAR GOREGAON ( EAST ) MUMBAI - 400 065 INDIA e-mail : gkm@igidr.ac.in http:// www.igidr.ac.in/lib/library.htm phone 91-22-28490653 ************************************************ On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Mailing List Manager wrote:
Dear Member:
You may recall that sometime back some of the LIS-Forum members had expressed their concerns about fellow members requesting for articles on LIS-Forum. Based on these concerns we had decided not to encourage members requesting for fulltext articles on LIS-Forum. In fact as a moderator, I had sent a message requesting members not to make use of LIS-Forum for document delivery service. Quite a few members reacted to this message saying that LIS-Forum should *Not Discourage* members occasionally requesting for some fulltext articles from the fellow members. Owing to this popular demand and also the fact that the number of posting on LIS-Forum were very minimal, we had decided to entertain requests for articles from the members only under 'fair use' clause.
Now the issue has been raised again. Till we take a policy decision on this matter, members should use LIS-Forum only as a last resort for their article needs and it should strictly adhere to the 'fair use' clause, i.e., for personal study/research only.
There have been occasional requests for fulltext articles by the LIS-Forum members working for commercial organizations. Such requests are not entertained at all. I hope we have been able to adhere to this stance of not to entertain article requests from commercial organizations is being consistently followed. At least in future we will ensure that requests for fulltext articles from commercial organizations will *not be entertained* on LIS-Forum
Thanks for your cooperation and support.
- moderator
Dear Moderator,
I wonder if it is a good thing to circulate messages asking for pdfs of articles by email? Isn't this against copyright policies of most publishers? By the way, Lis-forum messages are available to the public via google searches also so perhaps we should worry about this. (For this reason, you need not circulate this message but you could take a policy decision based on this)
With best wishes, Girija
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