Online Resource Sharing: Is this allowed? Ethical? Great service? What?!?

The other day I was plowing through my pile of journals and newsletters and found a whole list of copyright sources. I will post the list in the future, but it served as an impetus for some pondering.

In addition to this list, I have found myself dipping into all the resources available to me. I work at the University of Michigan - Dearborn, so I have access to their online resources and databases. Additionally, I work at Southfield Public Library and naturally have access to their resources. Finally, I am a student at Wayne State University, so, well, you know the drill.

On a number of occassions I have used my long informational reach to access articles that my patrons or coworkers could not get without me (or without driving elsewhere or without going through ILL). I've also used multiple resources from other places for my own consultation endeavors.

The situations vary: sometimes it's a really wonderful patron that wants that obscure journal article. If you're a really nice patron and you just need a single article or something quick, I won't subject you to having to go to Wayne State, sign up for a computer and then use one of their filthy machines while a homeless person watches porn next to you. Good patrons deserve better.

Other times it's a coworker or client that needs some research done. Sometimes their research sources aren't quite as fabulous as mine.

Although I do research favors for people, I never (until now) publicized it. While looking through my unfortunately huge listserv message box, I found that someone actually posted that they needed an article - full citation and all. They even admitted their library has no subscription, but one of their patrons needed it.

So, my quandry was this: is it legal? Is it ethical? The answer is: neither. I looked it up and found a great discussion at the University of Texas-Austin. Not exactly the most exciting reading, but enough to show that I shouldn't be doing that other than for my own personal scholarly research and that patrons should be going through ILL.

I also found a lovely PDF entitled, Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians. It's full of boring copyright mumb0 jumbo and excerpts from political discussions, etc. Pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about copyright as it relates to libraries and archives. Have fun with that.

Does this mean that I'll stop sharing my resources? Not until they take my access away ;) Am I really that wrong to provide excellent customer service? You know, I really can't help myself.