ABSTRACT
Academic libraries have now offered course reserves as a service to their students and faculty in three different centuries. Through various technological breakthroughs and many changes in copyright law, the service has remained a viable one but now approaches perhaps its most critical juncture. Will course reserves continue to exist as libraries, publishers and universities move from an information world that is still largely print-based towards one that will eventually be mostly electronic? If so, in what form? Technology is evolving so rapidly and copyright is still such an unsettled area of the law, that it is not much of an exaggeration to say that almost anything may happen. The only certainty in the situation is that the situation will change. Out of the fog of the perhaps innumerable futures that may lie ahead for course reserves, however, three broad categories of possibilities begin to emerge.
