Course Readings

For many years, the Library has been acquiring reading materials for courses. We allocate $50,000 each year to purchase both required and recommended texts. The Library receives a list of course content from Oredigger Outfitters and strives to make as many titles available to students as possible. Additionally, we have copies of textbooks available for checkout that are on loan by faculty members.

While we prefer electronic formats, we occasionally face limitations due to publisher restrictions, licensing agreements, and budget constraints related to the number of permitted users per title. Further, we cannot always buy print copies due to the e-access codes associated with specific textbooks or some textbooks only being available as unbound pages, which are unfit for library use. 

Use the links below to see the current course readings by course section or all titles within the collection:

During the Fall of 2024 (August-December), the library made 637 print and/or e-books available through purchases and existing subscriptions for our course readings collection. Our course readings collection grows year-to-year, but if we were to purchase the Fall 2024 course readings titles for the first time, it would cost the library over $160,000 (~$250/title). We were unable to purchase 27 known titles required for courses due to the reasons mentioned above.

Below is the information gathered to show the usage of our Course Readings Collection:

*This number is higher, but we were unable to gather usage for individual titles available in Knovel

What is considered a use? & How much money are we saving students?

For both print and ebooks, we are not able to determine how many students are accessing a title. If a book is used 100 times, that could be one student accessing or checking it out 100 times. Or, two students using it 50 times each or 100 students using it once. Furthermore, because we are unable to determine a student's individual use, we are unable to capture how much money we could save the average student.

Why are there so many titles with zero usage?

The library has struggled with informing students and faculty of the titles available for their courses. Additionally, it is currently a manual process for faculty to make Course Readings available in Canvas if the faculty member is even using Canvas (see Set Up steps). Lastly, some print titles are less likely to be used because we also have an ebook version available. 

Interested in seeing the data by title?

Faculty --- turn on the Course Readings in your Canvas course(s) and link to our resources on syllabi

Staff --- inform any students you work with that the library has a collection of course materials available

Students --- use them before you buy them, and then tell your friends!