Enhancing Your Library Content: The easy and cost-effective way

Do you often find that you can’t fulfil scanning requests for a specific article or chapter because you don’t subscribe to the journal or don’t hold the book in your institution’s library stock? Then EHESS for Further Education (or EFESS) might well be the solution for you. You may have heard of the extremely popular EHESS (Enhanced Higher Education Supply Service) that CLA introduced in partnership with the British Library to the Higher Education sector in 2015. This service is also available to FE colleges.

As per the CLA Education Licence Terms, if you want to share copies from books, journals and magazines for teaching and learning purposes, your institution needs to own a copy of the original in order to be able to make copies under the CLA Education Licence. This could be a physical copy of a book or a subscription to an e-journal. If the institution hasn’t purchased the material, then you can’t make further copies under the CLA Licence. But you may not always want to subscribe to a journal or magazine for the sake of a single article or buy a whole book just to copy one chapter for a tutor. The cost associated with this may mean that you have to refuse copying request.

Fortunately, in 2015 the British Library and CLA joint forces to offer EHESS (and later EFESS), which a document supply services that allows you to purchase individual chapters or articles from published material as copyright fee paid copies (or CFP copies). By paying the copyright fee, you effectively purchase an individual copy of the chapter or article that you need, so instead of the whole book or journal you then own the chapter or article. You CFP copy can then sit in your library as any other library stock purchase. And the good news is that if the material is also covered under the CLA Education Licence, you can make further copies to add to your VLE or include copies in print course and study packs for your students. You can also email copies to students direct if needed.

In addition EFESS allows educational establishments to purchase high quality scans, that are DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) as standard within 48 hours, providing you with unencrypted (unlocked) digital copies that are accessible with a quick turnaround time. EFESS is not only useful for ordering copyright fee paid copies – you can also use EFESS to outsource your scanning requests to order high quality scans of material that you already own. This is especially useful if you don’t have the staff or the time to make scans yourself or simply because you don’t have the equipment to scan the material.

If you are planning to make copies under the CLA Education Licence from any CFP copies that you request via EFESS, please note that not everything that is available from the British Library is also covered for further copying under the Licence and vice versa. If you are planning to make copies, please make sure to check first using our easy to use Check Permissions tool first. The usual extent limits of 5% of the whole publication or one chapter or article, whichever is the greater also apply.

Setting up an account is easy and if you are interested, then you can read further detail on the EFESS on our dedicated page, including FAQs. Here you can find information on how much the service costs and how you can pay for the service. Please don’t worry – we will only invoice you for actual transactions and there is no setting up fee or standing charge.

If you would like to set up an account, please download the agreement and send it to the stated email address with the accompanying details, and I will be in touch to help you through the process.