2018 Charleston Library Conference

Students and colleges continue to struggle with rising textbook costs. Open Educational Resource Textbooks (OER), though increasing in popularity, can be time consuming to adopt particularly with a growing and often transient adjunct instructor population. Interested in finding alternatives to the current model of students independently purchasing (or not purchasing at all) expensive textbooks, librarians at our two institutions have begun looking for ways to facilitate access to course materials through the library.

The first presentation will share Temple University’s process for identifying and selecting course materials to purchase and our strategy for making these discoverable for users. After obtaining a list of assigned materials from the campus bookstore, we used several technologies to gather information to assist in selection. We will describe in non-technical jargon some of the tools we used to uncover current holdings and identify potential titles to target, such as API queries, our local ILS, and Excel. We will also share how we created a dynamic webpage, using MySQL and php, to promote electronic course materials to patrons.

The second presentation will describe how the directors of the Library and Learning Center (LLC) and the office of Institutional Research & Training (OIRT) at Goldey-Beacom College decided to partner with Chegg, a popular Textbook / eTextbook rental company to co-manage a Spring 2018 eTextbook pilot program.