Books are traditionally set aside at the request of teachers from the main, normal loan collection to be put on reserve temporarily for checking out for a much shorter loan period to ensure that, at the expense of convenient, long-term loans for other users, all the students enrolled in a course have an opportunity to use them. Many studies have found that reserve usages are not high enough to justify the time and effort involved in making the arrangement. This article reveals that the accessibility and availability of materials to students, the idle status of reserve items on the shelf, and the usage of the collection may be improved if the access to books on reserve and on normal loan matches and fits the instructional choices of teachers and the study modes of students. As long as books in print format continue to play a role in the library collection, librarians have to manage their access to the best benefit of the users. Further studies on how the access to library materials can be managed and arranged concertedly to make the usage surpass the 80/20 rule are desired.
[Copyright of Journal of Access Services is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15367960903385771 ]