Customized coursepacks are becoming a frequent sight on the shelves of local bookstores and copy centers.

“Coursepacks have become a real phenomenon,” said Pam Mills, general manager of the University Book Store. “It has become a formalized process in the past five to six years,” she said.

The bookstore has seen an increase of about 325 to 375 titles being published through its Courseworks service in the past year, she said.

“Each semester we produce more. Out of 3,000 total [titles], 10 to 11 percent are coursepacks,” said Mills.

“We’ve been working with coursepacks ever since the store opened,” said Ann Dresselhaus, coursepack coordinator for Copyworks.

“The professors either drop things off, or we pick things up for them,” said Dresselhaus.

“Coursepacks are used quite a bit,” said Floyd Ballein, owner of Campus Bookstore. “It’s hard to go through a curriculum and not have to use them,” he said.

So far, for fall, CBS has 132 different courses using coursepacks, said Ballein.

“A good portion of coursepacks are generated through the University Book Store,” he said.

“We would purchase [coursepacks] through the University Book Store through resale,” Ballein said.

Dwindling budgets and accessibility are two factors that are influencing the increase in the number of coursepacks, Mills said.

“The coursepacks are put together into a customized package. They are a focused way to teach,” she said.

“We do have a lot of requests to publish coursepacks made up of instructors’ notes. Permission coursepacks entail more because of copyright laws,” Winifred Neely, UBS course materials supervisor, said.

A lot of titles that include copyrighted material come from the sciences and humanities, history, political science and English, Neely said. Non-copyrighted materials mostly come from the sciences and engineering, she said.

UBS works closely with the professors who want to publish coursepacks.

“The bookstore does all the footwork,” Mills said.

It is “fairly easy” for the faculty to put together a coursepack, she said. They can collect material from reviewing books, their own research and that of their colleagues.

“The faculty have someone to deal with their questions. We’ve seen an increase in that. In particular, we’ve seen a great many copyright requests, about 40 to 50 per packet,” Neely said.

The bookstore contacts the publisher to find out how much the copyright fees are, Neely said.

“We then make the professors aware of the fees [the publishers] are charging,” she said.

While the UBS contacts the publishers directly, the Campus Bookstore and Copyworks both handle the copyrights differently.

“Copyright clearance is handled through a national organization of college stores,” Ballein said.

Copyworks deals with copyrights through the Copyright Clearance Center, Dresselhaus said.

“The response time from the Copyright Clearance Center is one to two days,” she said.

Some professors may choose not to use the copyrighted material, Neely said.

Larry Northup, a professor of engineering, has been using coursepacks “probably for at least 10 years, if not longer,” he said.

Coursepacks are made specifically for the course, so they are precisely what is needed, he said.

“What students like about them are that they are as current and inexpensive as can possibly be,” Northup said.

While Northup’s coursepacks are usually made up of his own material, other professors use mostly copyrighted material.

“I use coursepacks in my graduate level classes in order to expose [students] to current literature published in periodicals,” said Paula Morrow, a professor of management.

The articles can be reproduced conveniently and in a package so that the students don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for them, she said.

“[Coursepacks] provide a convenient way for students to have access to recent info and can bring them to class easily,” Morrow said.

While the future of coursepacks looks bright, textbooks won’t become obsolete.

“Traditional textbooks won’t go away, but will become resource material and not the primary [classroom source],” Mills said.