Library Services for Faculty

All course developers at Harrisburg University must follow educational fair use guidelines and copyright law when sharing and disseminating copyrighted resources.  This page provides strategies to help ensure that you are legally using copyrighted material. Remember that the best way to avoid copyright violation over course materials is to have students access legal copies of material on their own by purchasing it, retrieving it through the library, or accessing material that is either in the public domain or created with open access permissions.

When sharing documents with students, only provide a link to the legal copy of the document, as sharing scanned, printed, or uploaded versions may violate copyright or license terms. For more detail, see the Copyright Information page.

Linking to Library Resources

When you share library resources, it is best use links to legally obtained copies of materials rather than emailing copies or uploading scanned or downloaded pdf copies to your course management system (CMS) or syllabus. The reasons for using this method are as follows:

• Linking helps you avoid inadvertent copyright violation, since you are pointing to the document on the original server, in its original context. Those who attempt to access the item using that link must authenticate themselves as authorized users of the material. 
• Linking keeps the library in compliance with contracts. The copying and posting of full-text is prohibited for many library online resources, but linking to them from a course management system is allowed. 
• The library will know how many times the linked item has actually been accessed. Accurate usage statistics allow library staff to make informed collection management decisions. If one person downloads an item and passes it around, it looks like the article received a single use. If the link is shared instead, the number of uses is recorded each time the item is accessed.
• The author of the item will know how many times it has been accessed. This use data, often referred to as “altmetrics,” is one measure of an article’s reach or impact and can be a factor in promotion, tenure, and grant applications.

In library databases, the link to a document is known as the stable link, permalink, or Digital Object Identifier (DOI). 

A DOI typically appears in a database along with the rest of an item's citation information, as shown:

If you cannot find a permalink for your article, Ask a Librarian for assistance.