Top Textbooks on Reserve: Creating, promoting, and assessing a program to help meet students’ need for affordable textbooks

ABSTRACT

In Fall 2014 the University of Maryland Libraries launched a textbook reserves program to help relieve the burden of high textbook costs on students. Although its initial performance was lackluster, workflow refinements and expanded promotion greatly improved usage, resulting in a tenfold increase in circulation and expansion of the program. This article describes the development and promotion of Top Textbooks on Reserve; offers extensive assessment using various performance metrics; and concludes that while a textbook reserves program is not a panacea for high textbook costs, it can be an effective means for academic libraries to help meet a significant student need.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• course reserves
• promotion
• textbook affordability
• textbooks

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to recognize and express our appreciation for all the library staff and student assistants who contributed to the development and execution of the Top Textbooks on Reserve program over the past three years: Caitlin Carter, Jamie Edwards, Douvonté Farmer, Geraldine Foudy, Scott Leffler, Audrey Lengel, Michael-Anthony Moore, Angie Ohler, Maggie Saponaro, Ritesh Sarode, James Spring, and Christopher Winters. Eric Bartheld, Aaron Ginoza, Rebecca Wilson, and their student assistants are commended for their excellent marketing of the Top Textbooks on Reserve. Finally, many thanks are due to Jamie Edwards and Gary White, who provided information on the program's initial development for this article, and to Dr. Paul Jaeger, whose course LBSC 791: Designing Principled Inquiry at the UMD iSchool informed the literature review.

Notes

1. The Textbook Reserves group also explored the possibility of purchasing e-books to increase accessibility and reduce time spent on physical processing, but unlimited simultaneous user versions of the top textbooks were not available for purchase, making e-preferred not a viable selection criterion at this time.

2. To view the most recent version of the program's logo, go to http://www.lib.umd.edu/access/top-textbooks.

3. The course codes with extremely underutilized textbooks are: Accounting & Information Assurance, Agriculture and Resource Economics, Civil Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and the Part-Time MBA program. Unlike the course codes with the highest textbook circulation (which are 70% STEM), the courses with underutilized textbooks span several academic disciplines.