You wrote: > >Dear Medlibers, > > The copyright law as I understand it to be states that: > > "you can only request 5 articles per calendar year > from a non-owned journal if those articles were > published within the last 5 years; otherwise, if > they were published more than 5 years ago, you can > request as many as your heart desires". > > It seems that we have not really been following that guideline at >my library. >Lynn Sirotnak Community Medical Center >[log in to unmask] Scranton, PA > Lynn, I have similar concerns. We do request more than 5 articles from certain journals in a given year. I don't think I can justify purchase based on usage in a given year. I am also concerned about filling ILL requests from our holdings. If I am asked by a library to photocopy 50 articles from one journal title for a single physician on their staff, what liability do I have as a lender? The journal I am presently referring to is used by not more than one or two physicians on our staff on a regular basis, so I think it is great that we are able to extend usage by resource sharing with another regional library. The alternative would be to drop the subscription, but then the copyright owner would not benefit at all (and the regular patron would be upset). The issue is confusing and intimidating. Perhaps I, too, am not understanding the law. [log in to unmask] Medical Staff Library Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula Monterey, CA