Managing Coursepacks and the
Permission Process Using Ares
How Depauw got control of the permission
process, saved money for the university and for
students all while making faculty think we are the
awesomest thing ever
 Small (2,300 students) liberal arts college
 The library includes 800,000 volumes, 20,000 electronic
journals, and about 200 subscription databases.
 Reserves represent almost 30% of our circulation to
students.
 Electronic reserves are also very popular, we had almost
3,000 last year.
Coursepacks at DePauw
 Long history . . .
 A small local shop called Fine Print used to make them and everyone
was happy.
 Then Ernie, the proprietor had a stoke

Right before a semester was about to start
o And chaos ensued
 So, a new system was needed . . . Fast
 Under the new system (which was really a little used old system) each faculty
member (or departmental secretary) managed their own permissions
 All by themselves
o DePauw had the only “umbrella” CCC account
• My predecessor had the master password and the CCC created accounts for
faculty on her request
Coursepacks at DePauw
 This went poorly . . .
 Sometimes faculty and secretaries got permissions for the
wrong thing
 Do a search for “Journal of a Plague Year” in the CCC. If you don’t
understand the concept of public domain and you don’t know much about
literature, you could easily pay $163.00 for 20 students to read 40 pages
of . . .
Parrish, John A. Journal of a PlagueYear. [London]: Fontana, 1979.
 Instead of paying nothing for 20 students to read all of the better
known . . .
 Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the PlagueYear. London: J.M. Dent,
1966.

Coursepacks at DePauw
 They got (or at least tried to get) permissions for things they
didn’t need permissions for . . .
 Public domain items, including gov docs, Project Gutenburg texts, etc
 Things they removed from their coursepacks at the last minute
 Things they really should just offer links to, like articles from subscription
databases
 They didn’t get permissions for things they needed permissions
for . . .
 Works not in the CCC database, especially foreign works
 Poems– what is it about poems that makes people assume they are public
domain?
 Articles in subscription databases
Coursepacks at DePauw
 And on top of that . . .
 There was no easy way for me to see what my faculty were
doing . . . Until I got the bill.
 There was no way to make sure each faculty member checked
in with the bookstore and adjusted their order to make sure that
DePauw wasn’t paying royalities on destroyed coursepacks
 Some faculty didn’t even seem to realize that many of their coursepacks
were going unsold
 I spent hours and hours each semester helping faculty and
departmental secretaries process their permissions.
Enter Ares . . .
 I pitched Ares to my administration as a way out of the
course pack morass, in addition to a reserves system.
 Having had extensive experience with ILLiad, I felt confident
I could create routing rules and custom queues to make Ares
process coursepack requests.
 Luckily, I was right!
 Most importantly, our Printing Services department was
thrilled to have the permissions issue off of their plate. They
viewed this not as usurpation, but as a genuine help.
Setting up the workflow . . .
 The coursepack workflow includes . . .
 Custom web pages
 Custom format
 Custom queues
 Routing rules
 To simplify things . . .
 The item format is embedded in the webpage and that is then used to
trigger the routing rule to route to the custom queues
Custom webpages
 http://www.depauw.edu/library/
 Let’s go look and see . . .
Custom web pages
 Note that the item formats come through from the webpages
 We found that offering a different link “Make a Coursepack”
made the website easier for faculty to find.
 Faculty have reported that the website is easy for them to
use, but they wish they could use SFX to submit.
Custom queues and routing rules
 The custom queues trigger the custom routing rules
 When a request comes in to goes to . . .
 Coursepack item to print
 Coursepack awaiting instructor supply
 Because . . .
Coursepack Awaiting Instructor Supply
Copyright Clearance Processing
 CCC gateway only prices for electronic reserves, so the
workflow in Ares cannot be used to price and submit orders
 So, we use the website instead . . .
http://www.copyright.com/
Custom queues and routing rules
 From there we manually route it to . . .
 Coursepack items to assemble
 If the coursepack is still waiting on more items, we route it
to . . .
 Coursepack items awaiting additional submissions
 We almost always know if the coursepack we are working on
is complete or not
 Once the coursepack is complete it goes to . . .
 Coursepacks completed and awaiting faculty review
 I call or email from my personal accounts to let faculty know the
coursepack is done
“Mandy’s Queue”
 CCC special orders sit in “Mandy’s Queue” until we get a
response
 Non-CCC items also go to ‘Mandy’s Queue”
 Anything else out of the usual workflow goes to “Mandy’s
Queue”
 I check on items in my queue at least a few times per week to
see how things are going.
Working with Printing Services
 Forms! Forms! Forms!
 In Quadruplicate!
 The Printing Services folks take their forms very very seriously.
 Sometimes faculty are hard to track down, so I decide the
color etc for the coursepack
 Printing services is FAST. They have a less than 48 hour
turnaround time.
Finishing the coursepack process
 Coursepacks completed and awaiting faculty review
 I call or email from my personal account to let faculty know the
coursepack is done
 Then . . .
 When we send the coursepack over, we route it zCoursepacks
sent to Printing Services
 Lastly, I check in with the bookstore to see how many
coursepacks were sold vs. destroyed and update the CCC to
reflect the number sold.