Print-on-demand technologies are changing the way students and lecturers access information worldwide. Debby Raven tracks UK experiments in 'instant courseware'

Printing out articles and chapters as you go to suit your course module is the reality for some students in British universities. The lucky few are attending courses which are involved with projects testing the electronic library of the future.

On-demand publishing could be a solution for hard-up (and full-up) university resource centres and libraries, where emphasis is shifting from holdings to access. The latest Library Association survey of higher education institutions revealed a strong commitment to investment in information technology this academic year, while 47 per cent predicted they would have to cut book and material funds.

Technical advances in digitisation and networking are also being assessed in the higher education funding councils' Electronic Libraries programme (eLib). More than Pounds 2 million of its Pounds 15 million funding allocation over three years is being directed at research into on-demand publishing.

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Delivering the materials over networks is the next step on from creating customised course packs from electronic resources. South Bank University, in Project Phoenix, has produced 26 course readers with material selected by tutors and packaged as a coherent whole. The packs are sold in bookshops or through departments, or the cost is absorbed into course fees.

So far, publishers are partners in research and not yet investing in developments themselves. But although researchers can only hope to recover costs, evolution into a commercial system is seen as crucial for projects such as ERIMS at Oxford University, which is establishing electronic readings in management studies, and testing payment mechanisms.

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Sometimes cost recovery is impossible. South Bank's Catherine Hurst says students would only be prepared to pay about half of the Pounds 30 an average course pack costs, which can rise to Pounds 80 because of copyright and to a lesser extent production fees.

Controlling copyright is much more of a headache as electronic information cannot be used under the fair dealing provisions which apply to printed information, something the Library Association, for one, is fighting to change. Publishers are uncomfortable with loss of control of their material in the electronic environment. In the early stages of Project Phoenix only half of publishers gave permission readily for electronic storage. But Leah Halliday, copyright officer with the SCOPE project based at Stirling University, says attitudes are changing: "The publishing industry has moved on a lot since this time last year when we first presented our model contract." SCOPE's trial of online delivery of materials involves the majority of Scottish universities, and has already produced five sociology course packs. The SCOPE model covers the viewing, printing and downloading of pages. If a publisher does not want to give permission to download, for instance, that element is disabled.

Acorn, another project at Loughborough University, is investigating using subscription agents such as Swets as third-party agents for copyright clearance and digitisation of periodical texts.

Technology is being developed to charge students as they go - for printing and copyright fees. "It is important that publishers see us as responsible intermediaries delivering additional revenue to them," says Phil Sykes, manager of learning resources at Liverpool John Moores University. Students can use a Netscape browser to access material for the postmodernism and fiction course module over a local area network. A simple local site licence covers a fixed number of students and materials, and use by individual students is controlled by "fingerprinting" each article as it is printed or copied.

Work at De Montfort University has developed copyright management tools which can track usage and monitor copyright occurrences. As part of Project Phoenix a prototype should be ready for one course this year, once network printing problems are solved. Emos's UnipriNT network printing control software is proving to be the solution.

The Open University's Edbank project, which aims to deliver multimedia materials for teacher training over the World Wide Web to eight schools, has to work out how it will collect revenue from on-demand use: the existing high-quality teaching packs are sold at Pounds 50.

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Philip Carpenter of Blackwell Publishing, a partner in the Liverpool team, is reassured that security is being taken so seriously: "It is our job to supply teaching materials in whatever form they are wanted. The project is establishing valuable evidence for benchmarking reasonable norms."

Booksellers may have more to worry about. The SCOPE sociology course packs sold at the Stirling campus's John Smith Bookshop did not affect textbook sales for the first semester, but the second semester saw textbook sales drop from 1 to 38. "Sales of copyright material went up, bookshop profits down." says Chris Sugden, John Smith retail branches manager. The reasons have not yet been analysed.

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As more material is delivered electronically booksellers are also likely to be hit by falling sales to universities as they order fewer multiple copies but more wide-ranging collections, says Chris Sugden.

"To be more positive, the booksellers' role could be based on what is happening in the US - looking after copyright management as well as the sale and distribution of course packs," he adds.

But SCOPE project coordinator Carolyn Rowlinson says: "The point of SCOPE is to monitor use, how students can best access text. This might mean selling course packs in unions, libraries - wherever is appropriate for students."

Students' lack of technical literacy is sometimes surprising. At Liverpool JMU 18 out of 21 of the humanities students had never used a networked PC before, so they were reluctant to access resources away from the learning resource centre.

In Scottish universities SCOPE has found there is a need for printed course packs alongside electronic delivery. How students handle learning from electronic information is being studied in Project eOn at the University of East London.

Publishers are gradually taking more notice of on-demand publishing. A new joint working party of the Publishers Association and the funding councils' Joint Information Systems Committee will discuss shared concerns when it meets in a few weeks' time. After all, if publishers do not get involved, they could face an empty future as academics publish directly over networks.

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