Affordable Course Materials

As academic librarians become aware of the challenges expensive textbooks pose to student success, they increasingly collaborate to provide zero-cost access to required course materials. Librarians at Illinois State University initiated a program to license e-books assigned in courses, surveying students and faculty in participating courses regarding their perspectives on textbook affordability and their experiences with the provided e-books. Student participants reported overwhelmingly positive responses and identified several ways in which the e-books enhanced their experience in the course. The findings suggest that providing assigned materials as e-books contributes to students’ engagement as learners and their academic success within courses.

This paper reports the results of a pilot project conducted Spring 2021 in which Milner Library licensed 75 assigned texts to 52 courses at Illinois State University. The authors used the pilot as a springboard to explore faculty perspectives on textbook selection, textbook affordability, and the role of the academic library in addressing the rising cost of textbooks. The results highlight the strong, and often deeply personal, beliefs faculty hold about textbook selection and textbook affordability, reveal several obstacles to achieving affordable access to course readings, and demonstrate the willingness of some faculty to partner with librarians and other institutional stakeholders to explore more affordable access to assigned resources.

Many academic libraries have historically limited textbook purchases. Given recent calls to support expanded online education programs and textbook affordability initiatives, however, many academic libraries have changed course to invest considerable amounts of money to license electronic books (e-books) that are assigned in courses. This study explores the value of these materials by leveraging commonly used evaluative methods, such as benefit-cost ratio and usage statistics, as well as novel criteria, including a quality analysis using Resources for College Libraries (RCL) and an analysis of the persistence of assigned titles across semesters. The findings suggest that assigned e-books are a wise investment of library funds within the authors’ institutional context. By investigating value from diverse perspectives, the authors assert the importance of approaching such a complex question with multimodal and inclusive methods.

This report describes the first year of a textbook affordability project by several Milner librarians in which the library purchased electronic copies of assigned textbooks for the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters. The report provides an overview of the project and includes key findings related to student savings, enhancing equity in access to course materials, implications for student success, and the library's return on investment.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, student textbook access and affordability have emerged as areas of focus for academic libraries to support student success. Librarians across departments at a public four-year institution developed a program to leverage campus information about textbook selection to inform library e-book purchases. The resulting eTextbook collection became an invaluable resource for students during the pandemic and created a direct connection between the work of Technical Services and Student Success. This presentation provides an overview of the project, discusses assessment elements, and highlights the vital aspects of collaboration within an academic library for student success.

Many academic libraries’ collection development policies have discouraged the acquisition of assigned textbooks, but recent trends to support textbook affordability, student success, and online learning have caused some library personnel to rethink this approach. Through recent efforts at our library to purchase available e-copies for assigned course textbooks, we became curious about title persistence, or the frequency with which a unique title is assigned across multiple semesters and within a single semester across multiple sections. In this presentation we provide some background and context for our textbook affordability efforts and examine several years of assigned textbook data at Illinois State University for title persistence, prevalence within fields of study, and the relationship between title persistence and specific publishers.