Reserve collections

Conventional reserve collections include books, copies of essays and papers as well as other media from the Library holdings, which have been collated by teaching staff to support a taught course or module. The shelf space for the reserve collections (in the self-collection area) is marked with the name of the relevant lecturer or the course title.

Note: Items from the reserve collections are not available for borrowing!

According to the German Copyright Act, lecturers may not distribute paper copies or otherwise make them available to all participants of a course. There are, however, two exceptions:

• Students can make copies of media in a reserve collection for their own individual use.
• For use in examinations, lecturers can make the required number of copies available to ensure every student has a copy; this is governed by §53 (3) line 1 item 2 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG).

Please contact the subject librarian for your course if you wish to set up a reserve collection. Please also note the guidelines on establishing reserve collections (German)

The copyright laws were changed on 1 March 2018. Please visit the copyright pages of our website for further details.

• Holdings of Passau's University Library and copies from the interlibary loan.


• Excerpts, not full books: the publication of material protected by copyright and not in the public domain is subject to strict regulation: a maximum of 15% of the page count but no more than 100 pages per book may be uploaded, cumulatively for all excerpts of a book.


• All non-proprietary books (70 years after the death of its author) may be digitised and published in their entirety, provided no third party rights exist.


• Articles from printed newspapers or periodicals may be published entirely if they make up not more than 40% of the newspapers or periodical.


• Printouts from databases may only be digitised if they are also available from a source other than the database.


• Smaller printed works of up to 25 pages in length may be digitised completely. Images and illustrations, poems, short articles and stories, short scientific/academic essays, song lyrics and songs are considered smaller works.


• Works created by you or works for which you have obtained persmission from the rights holders, e.g. presentation slides (with images, citations etc.); course readers (with images, citations etc.); course outlines; reading lists; exercises and solutions; abstracts, summaries, synopses etc.; case descriptions; minutes of proceedings.


• Excerpts from school books only with written permission from the relevant publishing house.


• Individual images and photographs; copyright-protected music recordings (less than 5 minutes); copyright-protected films (less than five minutes and in the case of movies, first shown in German cinemas more than two years ago); sheet music (less than six pages).

Please note that the above information does not constitute legally binding advice but is merely an indication of the legal framework and copyright practice at the University of Passau.

In order to ensure compliance with §52a, you should link to e-book chapters and e-journal articles rather than upload them outright. This can be done from the virtual learning environments (e.g. Stud.IP) or electronic reserve collections, and you can even design the link in such a way that University members can access the links from outside the university computer network by using their ZIM credentials. More about linking e-resources

Scanned works or excerpts may be made available to course participants in login-protected networks such as Stud.IP for the duration of the course; however it would be unlawful to make them available permanently. The lecturer who uploads the copyright-protected media is responsible for ensuring compliance with the copyright laws. More about linking e-resources.

All teaching staff of the University can request that journal articles and smaller book excerpts from the university holdings be scanned for use in the electronic reserve collections.

How to request a scan:

• Send the book(s) or copies together with the completed and signed scan request form to 'Universitätsbibliothek, Scan-Service Elektronische Semesterapparate'.
• You can use one form to have multiple articles or chapters digitised: simply make a note of this on the form.
• Any source texts submitted with the form are returned to the requesting person by internal mail once scanning is complete.
• The digitised pdf files are sent to the requesting person by e-mail.
• Please allow up to 5 working days for this service.

Orders or questions can be sent via e-mail to ubinfo@uni-passau.de.