2018 Charleston Library Conference

Academic libraries in the US/Canada are increasingly called on to directly support curriculum objectives through organization of open educational resource (OER) efforts and collection of other course materials - all in an effort to ease the problems associated with textbook costs for students in higher education settings. This session will include a status update on academic library collection development for curriculum materials and a report on analysis of a large scale data set of electronic textbook use worldwide and also specifically in the US/Canada. Trends in curriculum collecting by subject area and copyright year will be paired with analysis of institutional practices by geography and institution size. Case studies involving best practices on campuses making high use of open and licensed electronic curriculum materials will be included. Special attention will be paid to non-traditional curriculum materials such as books not labeled as textbooks and materials used in smaller classes. Challenges such as acceptance of electronic texts for classroom use and limitations on electronic textbook availability will also be discussed.