With the rising costs of textbooks, their affordability and accessibility in college and university campuses has emerged as a major financial obstacle for students. This challenge presents an opportunity for academic and research libraries in providing access to textbooks quickly without further straining student financial resources. Textbooks and purchases for course reserves have traditionally been excluded from the majority of academic and research libraries collection development policies. Encouraging libraries' to re-evaluate and re-strategize their traditional approach to textbook purchasing and course reserves is critical. Embracing more textbooks and expanding the course reserves has the potential to significantly improve users services in learning and teaching across campuses. Ultimately this evolving role for academic libraries provides another opportunity to demonstrate their value to campus administration and communities.
The poster will provide a textual analysis of randomly selected ARL and ACRL member collection development policies regarding textbook purchasing and course reserves practices. Using the UCLA Powell Library as an example, the poster will show the Library ‘s campus wide support of course reserve purchasing for print and electronic materials. The presentation will also include an assessment of course reserve data in a single academic quarter as follows - total courses offered on campus, the number of courses serviced by the library’s course reserves operation, total number of titles purchased, and the circulation statistics. Lastly the quality of user services for the course reserve system will be analyzed from order to receipt by Access Services in the library.
