Course Reserves

Course Reserves are located at the library's Information Desk.  A Monmouth College ID will be needed to check out a reserve item.  Unless otherwise stated, reserve items circulate for 2 hours in the building.  Viewing rooms are available for students who need to watch or listen to media items.

A current, searchable list of Course Reserves is available in the library's catalog.

You will need the following to check out a course reserve:

• Your MC ID card
• Name of the professor teaching the course
• The course number
• The title and author of the item you wish to check out

One-time use of an article for course reserve purposes is covered under the Fair Use portion of U.S. Copyright Law. When reserving articles for consecutive semesters, faculty are responsible for obtaining permission from the publisher and placing a copy of the permission letter on file at the Library. Contact the Hewes Library director for additional information, (309)457-2192.

The process

To place an item (library book, article, media, or personal item) on course reserve, complete a Hewes Library Reserve Form, available below and at the Library Information Desk.

Hewes Library materials and your personal items may be placed on reserve. The library CANNOT place I-Share items or items owned by other libraries or community businesses (for example, Family Video) on reserve due to copyright restrictions.

Please allow 48 hours for processing. At times of high volume, especially at semester's beginning, processing may take longer. For this reason, we recommend that reserve forms be submitted well in advance of their anticipated date of first use.

Tell your students

In order for your students to quickly and easily locate the materials you have placed on course reserve, please ensure that you have communicated to them the following information:

• Professor's name
• Course number
• Title of item
• Author of item
• Format (book, article, video, etc.)

By default, course reserve items are used in-house only, for a loan period of two hours. Each patron can check out two reserve items simultaneously. If you would prefer other terms of circulation, please contact us.

Semester's end

At the end of each semester, all items lose their course reserve status. Hewes Library materials will be reshelved, and unclaimed personal copies will be returned to their owners via campus mail. If you would like to place an item on reserve for consecutive semesters, please contact us beforehand (and be sure to read the copyright compliance policy below).

Each department and interdisciplinary program is allocated funds to purchase books and media. Departments may also make recommendations about periodical titles for addition to the collection, but due to high periodical costs, this is not always immediately possible. To supplement your disciplinary publishing catalogs, we distribute Choice review cards to departments on a monthly basis. We will also accept emails and photocopied pages from publishing catalogs.

From order to receipt, the turnaround time for typical items is one month for hardbacks and two months for paperbacks. Hardbacks are encouraged for long-term use in the library. Because paperbacks have a shorter shelf-life, we use our vendors’ bindery option for all paperbacks that we order. The additional bindery time necessary for paperbacks delays the receipt of these orders by a 4-6 weeks. Materials that are out-of-print, in high demand, rare, or have some other special characteristics, may take longer to acquire.

Ordering information

Place orders with the Library Acquisitions Manager, Marti Carwile (x2191), libacq@monmouthcollege.edu.

When ordering materials, please provide as much information as possible, to ensure that the item ordered is exactly the item requested:  Author, Title, Publisher, year of publication, edition, list price, and ISBN.

• Requestor information: Your name and department, for allocation purposes. If you have more than one library allocation that you use, please specify the allocation fund that should be charged. Please let Marti know if your department has a specific individual who approves all departmental orders.
• If materials are needed immediately (i.e., earlier than the typical 1-2 month order/processing period), please make this clear when ordering.
• If they should be placed directly on Course Reserve, please let us know when placing the order.
• If other special circumstances exist, please state this at the time of ordering.

Allocation deadlines

We recommend the following schedule for the use of departmental allocations:

• December 1st: 40% of your allocation should be expended.
• February 1st: 80% of your allocation should be expended.
• April 1st: 100% of your allocation should be expended.

At each deadline, departmental chairpersons will be sent reports of year-to-date encumbered amounts. If materials ordered prior to June 30 do not arrive until after July 1, then the item may be charged to the next fiscal year.

If you have questions, please contact Marti Carwile (x2191), Hewes Library Acquisitions Manager, libacq@monmouthcollege.edu.