During 1999 the University Libraries of Notre Dame took an important step towards the goal of offering digital access to their resources whenever possible, by automating one of the last remaining manual operations reserves. One outcome of its late adoption of automation was that when the Reserve Book Room gained the capability to offer electronic access to its resources, it became the only Notre Dame library operation capable of offering online access to virtually all its resources. In electronic reserves, course readings are digitized and placed online, making them available to students electronically, either over a campus network or over the Internet.
Students are then able to access the readings from any computer capable of accessing the network.
The documents may be read online, or, more typically, printed out. The advantages over traditional paper reserves are significant. In the traditional reserves operation, instructors place books or journals, or photocopies of articles, chapters, past exams, solution sets, etc., on reserve for the use of students enrolled in a course. The loan period for items on reserve is much shorter than for other library materials, in order to make them accessible to more of the students enrolled in the course, by ensuring that no one person can check out the items for the duration of the course. However, paper reserves suffer from a number of inherent limitations.