I'm asking for help from the good people of Autocat and Serialst after
what seems like a long time lost in the archives and logs of both lists.
I could swear I saw something on one of these about scanning tables of
contents into an in-house e-mail system and/or copyright of tables of
contents.  Perhaps some kind soul can point me in the right direction.

Our library currently has an ordinary, fairly low-tech TOC routing service
for our inhouse staff.  Our online check in system prompts us when we
check in a journal someone has asked for TOC for, we photocopy it, and
deliver it.  Last year we got e-mail software on our building-wide
network.  We're working on next year's budget and the library director
would like to include money for a scanner.  This way we could scan the TOC
into the e-mail system and save a lot of time.  With this option, the TOCs
would just go to those inhouse staff who requested the title, or possibly
to the whole staff.

Just recently we created a fledgling home page on the Internet and the
powers that be want to have more 'stuff' on it so our members will see
what a fabulously wonderful service the home page is.  (We are a
non-profit association.)  The library director was thinking about perhaps
putting the scanned TOCs on the home page too, but we are concerned about
copyright issues.

Obviously there are commerical TOC services and I'm sure some of them at
least are online now.  We don't subscribe to any of them because of the
expense involved.  We also wondered if copyright issues were different
if we had the TOCs on a section of the home page that only our members
could access, as opposed to just 'out there' where anyone could call up
our URL and find them.

I seem to recall some discussion on one of the lists as to whether TOCs
were under copyright in the same way that articles are, etc.  I've
starting surfing around some of the copyright web resources, but have not
winnowed things down yet.

I'd appreciate responses from the list--even if this question seems like a
'no brainer'.  Please send directly to me, unless the rest of the list has
a burning desire for the answers.  Thanks.

Susan Harman
Medical & Chirurgical Faculty Library
techserv@access.digex.net