Course Reserves Guide: About Course Reserves

Course Reserves is a library service that supports teaching and learning by partnering with instructors to provide students with access to their course materials in electronic and print formats.

Service Highlights:

• Seamless integration with the University's learning management system, Waterloo LEARN.
• Equity-based approach.  We provide students with a no-cost option for many of their course materials.
• Copyright clearance and licensing.
• Accessibility. We tag files and apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to make them navigable, searchable and readable.   

***Starting in Fall 2026, Course Reserves will be delivered on the Leganto platform.***

Leganto is a cloud-based course resource list management solution that integrates with LEARN and the library's collections. 

"Meet Leganto" video is © ExLibris, part of Clarivate.

With Leganto, instructors can:

• seamlessly integrate Leganto with their course in Waterloo LEARN,
• build a course materials list using electronic and physical resources in Waterloo Libraries' collections; from a syllabus, from a website or references you have saved to the Zotero citation management tool.
• organize a resource list by week using a default template or fully customize by creating their own sections,
• tags materials as 'required' or 'optional' for students,
• post PDFs that students can engage with collaboratively through social annotation,
• track student usage of resources,
• roll over (duplicate) a list from a previous term.

Refer to the "Instructor Quick Start" section of this guide for more information about these features.

The library takes care of any materials requiring copyright clearance or digitization.

With Leganto, students can:

• easily access their course reserves lists in one place, anytime and anywhere, on your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone.
• adjust accessibility settings,
• mark assigned items in a list as 'done',
• add private notes to PDFs or share annotations with your classmates,
• save resources to a favourites list.

Refer to the "Information for Students" section of this guide for more information about these features.

Both instructors and students access Leganto right from the course homepage in LEARN by clicking on the "Get Course Reserves" link in the Library Resources widget.