Librarian-Faculty Partnerships help student retention and success. This guide includes:

• Online modules to integrate into your courses and assignments;
• Librarian-Led Instruction delivered to your students and tailored to fit your student learning outcomes;
• Print and Electronic Collections to support your programs;
• How to request materials be added to ACC Libraries' collection, and much more.

Trends in Librarian - Faculty Collaboration:

Commercial Textbooks Present Challenges in a Virtual Environment

As we approach the fall 2020 semester, library staff are working hard to provide alternative access to ...required textbooks, and students cannot access them without coming into the library. To support instructors and students over the next several months, we are developing new approaches to how we acquire course textbooks, to ensure that students have access, even in a primarily online, alternative delivery environment.

However, this work is hampered by textbook publishers who do not provide electronic purchasing options for libraries. Approximately 85% of existing course textbooks are simply unavailable to libraries in any other format than print. Textbook publishers have built their profit models around selling e-textbooks directly to students. Despite this, we also know that the cost of textbooks and other course materials represent a major financial hurdle for students...

Despite the library’s commitment to make copies of all required textbooks and course materials available to assist those students who are unable to purchase their own, the following publishers will not allow us to purchase an e-textbook version of their publications:

• Pearson
• Cengage
• Houghton
• McGraw Hill
• Oxford University Press Canada (Textbook Division)
• Elsevier imprints (especially in veterinary and health science) such as:

   

  • Elsevier Health Science
  • Mosby
  • Saunders
• Thieme

This means that in courses that have adopted textbooks by these publishers, students who do not purchase the textbook will not have any alternative access to the textbook content. 

We are working with instructors to explore and identify viable textbook alternatives, including:

1. Using an existing e-book in the relevant subject area from the library’s e-book collection or requesting that the library purchase one. There are many academic e-books that aren’t considered textbooks, and are therefore available for the library to purchase.
2. Adopting an open educational resource (OER). OERs are freely available educational materials that are openly licensed to allow for re-use and modification by instructors...

Efforts will be made to secure online materials that are free from digital rights management restrictions (DRM) in order to ensure unfettered student access. DRM includes limits on the number of users that can access a resource at any one time, as well as limits on copying, printing and downloading.

Excerpt from 2020 Statement on commercial publishers adapted and used with permission from Library colleagues at Guelph University Library - Commercial Textbooks Present Challenges in a Virtual Environment

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