2018 Charleston Library Conference

LOUIS, the library consortium for universities and colleges in Louisiana, funds affordable learning projects on an ongoing basis. Through these projects and individual efforts, LOUIS member libraries have undertaken a variety of approaches to encourage faculty to adopt no-cost or low-cost course material, to save students money. These approaches include strategies that leverage library collections and purchasing models to enable faculty to proactively select materials and design courses around affordability. To enable this, Louisiana State University librarians created a search tool and, building off this success, LOUIS partnered with GOBI to release a faculty portal. These tools enable faculty to search unlimited-user, DRM-free e-books alongside indexed Open Access materials and Open Textbooks. Faculty can select titles for purchase and the requests are routed to the appropriate institution for follow-up. This new collection-building model exposes faculty to publisher content during the course material selection process, proactively engaging the scholarly community. It is also a way for libraries to demonstrate meaningful usage and value to their institutions.
This panel will feature LOUIS-member librarians from the University of New Orleans and LSU to discuss the successes and challenges in engaging their faculty in this mission, and how library e-books, particularly DRM-free e-books, can offer economies for course curricula. It will also feature the perspective of a vendor, EBSCO, who is partnering with UNO on user testing to determine what the optimal course-linking solution is, leveraging course management systems. The panelists will share findings from this user research, aggregate data that illuminates how access models impact student use of library materials, as well as the results of a broad faculty study (undertaken in partnership with Library Journal) on the use of e-books in courses.