New Approaches to E-Reserve

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Overview of e-reserve

History and scope

The concept of library reserve, a physical collection of high-use and shortterm loan materials for quicker circulation, emerged as far back as in the nineteenth century. Electronic reserve or e-reserve was started in the United States in the early 1990s, as a ‘collection of digital course materials made available over one or more computer networks’ (Kristof, 1999: 1), and San Diego State University was the first library in 1993 to report an experiment with delivering course reading materials through such a network. While 1991–4 was the experimentation phase, when only a few libraries piloted the electronic approach to managing their high-use collections, 1995–9 witnessed the fastest development, resulting ...