Course materials

Course materials, such as textbooks, book chapters, journal articles, past exams and cases, are recommended by lecturers and made available online via the Course Materials Database (CMD) or in each branch library's Course Reserve Collection. On this page you can find information on:

• How to access the Course Reserve Collection
• How to access the CMD
• Access for students with vision impairment
• Printing from the CMD
• Readability of documents

How to access the Course Reserve Collection

Items held in the Course Reserve Collection can be borrowed and used within the library. Loans are for a maximum of two hours. You can find out what is in the Course Reserve from the Unit readings search page.

How to access the CMD

Most material is available via the CMD, which is accessible from both on and off campus. There are several options for accessing the CMD:

• the CMD website
• the Course Materials Database (CMD) link under Learning Resources on QUT Blackboard unit pages
• the Library's Unit readings and selected past exams search page

If you are having trouble accessing the CMD, contact the IT Helpdesk.

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Access for students with vision impairment

The library attempts to make readings in the CMD available in a format accessible for students with vision impairment. However, it is not always possible to convert all of the content in scanned documents to a text format suitable for use with screen readers.

If you have difficulty accessing a CMD document for this reason, please contact the Learning and Research Desk or the  Ask a Librarian service for assistance with obtaining the document in an alternative format.

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Printing from the CMD

All CMD items greater than three megabytes are split into multiple documents for easier downloading. If experiencing difficulties when attempting to print, it is recommended that you save the document and then print from this file.

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Readability of documents

The best quality scan of an item is added to the CMD. However, the quality of the original document affects the quality of the scanned document. Variations from the original document may occur during the scanning process. CMD items which are scanned from older resources or microfilm may be of a lesser quality.

Each page of the scanned document is checked for readability, and editing is performed where possible. However, it is not possible to edit some inaccuracies from the original e.g. italics and certain fonts. Try the following options if you're having trouble reading the document:

• Check if the library holds a copy of the original document.
• Some documents may appear blurry on screen, but will print more clearly. Print a single page to compare the print quality of the document to the screen quality.
• Print out the document on an increased page size, e.g. from A4 to A3.
• Alter the text size by cutting and pasting into another application. However, do not copy large proportions of a whole item unless it's for assisting vision impairment, other wise copyright could be breached.

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