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Course Reserves: Faculty Information

What are Reserves?

Reserves are required course materials that are made available to all students in a class.

  • Physical reserves have a loan period of four hours so that students have equal access to these resources. 
  • Electronic reserves include e-books, digitized films, book chapters and journal articles.

Reserves staff work with the acquisitions department to order any materials not yet owned by the Libraries, when possible.

How to Submit Requests

The priority deadline for Fall 2025 course reserves is Monday, August 4, 2025. Requests sent before this date should be substantially available by the start of classes.

To submit a reserves request, email libraryreserves@smith.edu and attach a copy of your syllabus as a Word document.

  • Include the course code (ex.: ENG 118) in the subject line.
  • If you prefer, you can attach a document or spreadsheet of required items instead of a syllabus.
  • Please include author and title information for each item. Include additional information such as page numbers, journal volume or edition if it is needed to identify the correct item.

Reserves staff will ask for clarification if more information is needed.

Limitations

  • Course reserves links on Moodle will not automatically roll over each semester with your new course site.
  • Requests will be processed in the order they are received. Please allow two weeks for a list to be processed. If the list contains materials not yet owned by the Libraries, availability of those items depends on when they arrive and are processed.
  • The library is not able to purchase material from streaming media services such as Netflix or Hulu.
  • Publishers and vendors set limitations on e-books. Not all books are available as e-books. Some e-books (such as for Kindle) are only available for personal use and not under a library license. Others are available only under single-user licenses, which prevents multiple students from being able to access a title at the same time.
  • Reserves are subject to copyright regulations.

Accessibility

The Libraries make every reasonable effort to ensure that all instructional materials are accessible. Submitting course materials to the reserves team allows us to make sure that all materials can be used by all students to the fullest extent possible. Please see the college's web page Accessible Instructional Materials for more information on how to make texts and media accessible to students. Learn more about accessibility on the ACRL website.

Contact Us

Email: libraryreserves@smith.edu
Call: 413-585-2910

For help with Moodle including usernames or passwords, please contact the IT Service Center at ithelp@smith.edu

See our FAQs for answers to questions about e-books, e-reserves, and more.