Annotated Bibliographies Online

Legal Issues in Flexible Learning - Q and A

I am a TAFE Librarian and we have created our own index of information from magazines we suscribe to that is available on our website for online students. The index contains only descriptive information including magazine title, article title, author, and a short abstract (either taken from the publication or written by librarians - in either case it would be about 200 words maximum). It does not contain the actual articles. We would like to know if we are allowed to make this information available on our website under copyright law. Also - should we include a copyright notice of some kind on the site?
Thankyou.
!What the lawyers say...
The index
One of the basic principles of copyright law is that before you can commit an infringement, you must have copied a 'substantial part' of a copyright work. If you are copying for the educational purposes of your institution, a 'substantial part' is defined as up to 2 pages of a work (or, if the work is more than 200 pages, up to 1% of the number of pages in the work). Preparing a brief index with biographical information and a brief extract as you describe is therefore unlikely to involve the copying of a substantial part of a work.
Placing material on a website
Educational institutions are allowed to communicate material (ie, electronically transmit it or mak