Cori Wilhelm: Right we're recording. So thank you. Everyone for joining us for the next spotlight and singing libraries today's presentation is the next chapter in textbook affordability.
Cori Wilhelm: a conversation about textbooks and libraries, and this one a little different. We have 4 panelists from 4 different campuses will be sharing with us, and we're really hoping it is a conversation.
Cori Wilhelm: So we're hoping to get, you know, Audience. in putting questions as we go through. So just a brief agenda.
Cori Wilhelm: We're going to review the textbook programs in each of the libraries and take a look at how they acquire market and their programs. And then we're going to take a look at what's next for these tools and what's next in textbook affordability.
Cori Wilhelm: and there will be time at the end for questions and conversation. If you have a question, please feel free to throw it in the chat. You can also raise your hand. And then, like I said at the end, we'll have
Cori Wilhelm: hopefully some time to really hear from folks. So first we're going to meet our panelists and panelists you can
Cori Wilhelm: way for, say, Hi, Mary to Orzek from Sunni, Rockport.
Jess Spooner: Jess Kooner, from
Cori Wilhelm: Rebecca Hewitt, from
Rebecca Hewitt: Good morning.
Brenda L Hazard: and Brenda Hazard from Hudson Valley Community College.
Cori Wilhelm: and these 4 awesome librarians were kind of selected because each of their campuses are doing things with textbooks, and they're each doing different things, which is what I think is a great thing to share out.
Cori Wilhelm: So to get rolling.
Cori Wilhelm: i'll see if they can make this work.
Cori Wilhelm: What do you think the average
Cori Wilhelm: public for your students spend on textbooks in a year?
Cori Wilhelm: I can throw it in the phone. This is an average. It is from college board 22,
Cori Wilhelm: and
Cori Wilhelm: it's like we have about half the responses, and then we have give up in a few moments.
Jess Spooner: Too much is the
Cori Wilhelm: okay? Looks like
Cori Wilhelm: pretty much people
Cori Wilhelm: and the end of 3, 2, one.
Cori Wilhelm: Okay. So are you able to see the results?
Cori Wilhelm: Well, we have a very smart audience today, of course, because they must be librarians, so they did get correct answer 17 out of 38 the correct answer
Cori Wilhelm: of $1,240, and with interesting this staff from college board. This is public 4 year it is the same amount for private for year.
Cori Wilhelm: but public 2 year students spend the last amount $1,460, which is interesting because they're generally only there for 2 years, but I think
Cori Wilhelm: a lot of those books tend to be the most expensive. I will stop.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah.
Cori Wilhelm: and we'll move on. We know we all know really what the problem is.
Cori Wilhelm: This is a graph of the cost of textbooks versus the consumer price index, which is general consumer goods, gas food
Cori Wilhelm: cars, real estate things like that, and, as you can see.
Cori Wilhelm: the gap is widening. There has been a little drop in textbook costs in the last few years, and I think that's due to a lot of different initiatives like, oh, we are more things being available online.
Cori Wilhelm: But I think we're all pretty aware of the problem.
Cori Wilhelm: And so each of our panelists has done something to tackle the problem. So we're just gonna kind of go around and share the origin of your textbook program, and how your campus supports it, and maybe we will start with Rebecca.
Rebecca Hewitt: Sure, thanks, Corey. My
Rebecca Hewitt: interest in the subject that really began when I was a student at Penn State. and I noticed in reading the Penn State newsletter that their library had a
Rebecca Hewitt: had a fund, have a philanthropic outreach that donors could donate to. That was a fund dedicated to buying textbooks. So they had quite a robust
Rebecca Hewitt: textbook program
Rebecca Hewitt: at Penn State, and I came to Polly in 2,016. With this in mind, thinking, would this be
Rebecca Hewitt: so great?
Rebecca Hewitt: My, the my boss, at the time Shannon printing is on the call. So, Shannon, I invite you to to speak up if you'd like to add something. But Shannon and I were both interested in
Rebecca Hewitt: starting a textbook program here, and we started out by applying for a grant to fund it from our campuses, auxiliary Services Division.
Rebecca Hewitt: Many of you have auxiliary services, divisions. They run food Service laundry, you know other sorts of of money making operations on many of our campuses
Rebecca Hewitt: and our auxiliary services unit gives grants to various entities on campus, so we were able to secure a grant from them, and we used it to purchase textbooks for a couple of semesters starting around 2,017,
Rebecca Hewitt: and it took off quite well. Our student government noticed what we were doing, and our student government started
Rebecca Hewitt: giving us some funding to support textbook purchases also. and we used some money from the libraries on general collection budget.
Rebecca Hewitt: So it was. We really had the ground running, and have been able to continue to fund it
Rebecca Hewitt: through grants and through the library's collection development budget.
Rebecca Hewitt: Our campus supports our efforts. but to quite a great extent. As I said, our student government, you know we didn't ask them. They noticed what we were doing, and they came to us to offer additional funding.
Rebecca Hewitt: and we do a tremendous amount of outreach to faculty and including emailing them at the beginning of every semester, saying, These are the books that we have.
Rebecca Hewitt: If we have ebooks, we provide a link to the professor, and the professor can put that link in the syllabus. Put that like in blackboard, and make those materials available directly to students. So Our program includes both print textbooks and wherever possible. Ebooks.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks. How about Brenda next?
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah, Sure. So maybe in in contrast to Rebecca's description of Sunni Poly the textbook reserve service has been in place here at Hudson Valley for decades.
Brenda L Hazard: What's different is it? Was run out of our media center, which was separate from the library until 2,016, when there was some personnel changes in the library to go over the media center, and we moved the textbook collection to our first floor service desk.
Brenda L Hazard: and from 2,016 for the next several years
Brenda L Hazard: reserve textbook. You circulation. That was the majority of our circulation compared with everything else that we did. It was reserved textbooks.
Brenda L Hazard: We have over 600 textbooks available that are on reserve, and they're maybe about 250 courses represented in there.
Brenda L Hazard: and they're fully integrated, and all mine can be searched that way. We also have a really nice user centered search interface that you'll see in one of the future slides. I'm really fortunate to have a staff member, Donna Craver, her overseas
Brenda L Hazard: the print textbook collection. So a lot of this, you know, is, thanks to to Donna's fine work.
Brenda L Hazard: We do not have articles that we have on reserve. I know some campuses do that. It's all just textbooks and Dvds in 2,020. When Covid arrived our
Brenda L Hazard: it it completely changed our reserve textbook usage. It dropped from about 15,000 circulations a year to basically a couple of 100. And i'll talk more about that later on. The campus support is really essential.
Brenda L Hazard: We get a grant annually. This was in place before 2,016. So, thanks to my predecessor for for his fine work, and and setting this up
Brenda L Hazard: the app, the student Senate provides about $12,000 a year. It's basically a grant at the bookstore so that we can print. We can purchase print copies at list price same prices. The students pay from the book store to support the reserve textbook collection.
Brenda L Hazard: That's about 80 of our collection, and the other about 20% comes from departmental donations that they send books over. We process them and put them on reserve here later on. In the presentation i'll tell you how we're really transforming our collection and rethinking it. And we'll i'll talk about our E textbooks.
Brenda L Hazard: the pilot that we're doing, and so more to come on that
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks, Brenda. I'm: just you to talk about Ken's program.
Jess Spooner: Yeah, i'll just talk briefly about the canon one since we're doing future slides as well. But I came to Sunni Kant in 2,005, and we did have a re. Your textbook and reserve program in place, but it wasn't like the program that we have today.
Jess Spooner: It has grown a lot, and it's grown based on the need. So, as the need need has grown for this, our program has grown for this
Jess Spooner: we have funding through
Jess Spooner: our administration our faculty donates books, or they try to get books for us that they'll be using. And we also have students donate textbooks that they're not using. At the end of the semester they see the program. They see how useful it is for other students, and they'll come in and bring us their books at the end of the semester, if
Jess Spooner: they're not going to be using them again. So that's briefly what Suni Canton does, and
Jess Spooner: how we get our books in our funding
Cori Wilhelm: thanks, and Mary Jones for
Mary Jo Orzech: Hi Al. Our program at Brockport has grown incrementally out of a traditional reserve program
Mary Jo Orzech: that was in existence even before 2,017. But since about 2,017,
Mary Jo Orzech: the friends of Drake Library have been one of the primary motivators in terms of providing some funding
Mary Jo Orzech: to help us provide textbooks on short term loan. It's not been part of our
Mary Jo Orzech: usual traditional concentration for our for our library collection. So the textbooks has been, have been
Mary Jo Orzech: well received, but and has growns, is a small collection
print collection, primarily
Mary Jo Orzech: since about 20,
Mary Jo Orzech: so in 2020. Frankly, we purchased only ebooks we moved because people weren't in the library and that's been a a real eye-opener for us, because the E texts have been
Mary Jo Orzech: so much more widely accessed, have received a lot more of circulations or downloads.
Mary Jo Orzech: And so that's been something that we've been since that time we're really trying to concentrate and move in that direction towards more ebooks. Either either single use carbon copies or 3 use copies or unlimited license depending on what the publishers allow us to do.
Mary Jo Orzech: And so that's been our program to date. We do not just textbooks, but we also have over a 1,000 items on on reserve. At this point
Mary Jo Orzech: some are are given to us by faculty, personal copies, and so on. But we all we have books. Dvds teacher, certification guides as well as anatomy models that we that we all have been very popular with students.
Mary Jo Orzech: And so that's primarily the way that our program works, thanks to the friends of Drake Library for their participation in this.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks, everyone.
Cori Wilhelm: And we've all touched on this a little bit in your responses about where you get your books on.
Cori Wilhelm: But if you have anything to elaborate on on what you've already shared on, you know, if you mentioned the bookstore, and how that works and faculty donations.
Cori Wilhelm: But we'll start this time with Brenda.
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah. So we get most of our physical book textbooks from the bookstore at full price, and the library purchases a very small number of print books
Brenda L Hazard: to support the reserve collection, and i'll tell you more about the grant funding that we're using for our E textbook pilot project. I'll tell you more about that later.
Cori Wilhelm: Okay, thanks. Mary Joe. Anything to add. Here
Mary Jo Orzech: we do work with our bookstore in terms of. They send us a list of high enrollment courses, and those are the books that we primarily draw from in terms of which books should we purchase.
Mary Jo Orzech: Oh, that's been sort of the primary way that we that we obtain the books that we have.
Mary Jo Orzech: But I think every I think people have mentioned some of the other things as well as faculty donations, and so on.
Cori Wilhelm: Hey, Jess?
Jess Spooner: Yeah. So the one thing that we do that's pretty cool is
Jess Spooner: at the end of the semester. I guess more to the end of the year. Students clean out the rooms we have. We had to clean out your room. Event, and students would leave books behind, and then the people running. The event would collect those books, and they bring them over to the library for us, and that's how we would obtain some of our
Jess Spooner: books for our collection. And it was sometimes some of the heavily used books like our math book statistics, books like that that we get large amounts of add to our collection
Cori Wilhelm: great in Rebecca from Poly
Rebecca Hewitt: Poly. Does all of those things.
Rebecca Hewitt: But what I think we do, that's a little different in.
Rebecca Hewitt: I I think, is especially impactful is that we try very hard to surface material. That's already in our collections. So every semester we get a spreadsheet from our bookstore with that semester's, textbook orders.
Rebecca Hewitt: and
Rebecca Hewitt: we now there. There are 2 of us full time here at the Poly Library these days, and the 2 of us spend probably 4 full days with 2 people working on it.
Rebecca Hewitt: going through that textbook list and checking the titles by hand against our library catalog of print and ebooks.
Rebecca Hewitt: and we
Rebecca Hewitt: uncover
Rebecca Hewitt: dozens and dozens of books that are already in our collections that have been ordered as textbooks for that semester, and the reason we have to do it by hand is that
Rebecca Hewitt: there there we have been unsuccessful in finding any way to do any kind of Isbn or other automated matching.
Rebecca Hewitt: Because, for example, if there's a course that's reading Margaret Atwood's, the handmade's tail.
Rebecca Hewitt: you know there's 60 different editions of the handmade's tail out there. and
Rebecca Hewitt: any of those 60 will do for the most part
Rebecca Hewitt: for the class that needs to read that book, so we have not been able to automate that process, but
Rebecca Hewitt: it's incredibly important to us. Now. I know that Jen Parker is on the call. One of the things that Poly has done to assess.
Rebecca Hewitt: Our project is when Jen Perker is now at Portland, and and was here at Poly in 2,018. Jen and I undertook a process to
Rebecca Hewitt: assess the usage of our textbooks, and one of the things that we found was that
Rebecca Hewitt: books in our request ebook collection
Rebecca Hewitt: We we're used 3 times as often in the semester that we
Rebecca Hewitt: sent them out to faculty and students advertising that their course books were available from the library.
Rebecca Hewitt: So you have books in your ebook collections that are used in courses and students and faculty aren't finding them on their own.
Rebecca Hewitt: You need to surface those materials and advertise their availability. And that has been a huge part of our project. And, as I said, it has boosted our ebook stats
Rebecca Hewitt: tremendously so. I know that it seems like an impossible test.
Rebecca Hewitt: and you know, City poly is an institution with fewer than 3,000 students. So we don't have, you know. thousands and thousands of courses to go through, but
Rebecca Hewitt: we are so committed to maximizing the use of library materials, especially those that are already owned that we dedicate
Rebecca Hewitt: day upon day
Rebecca Hewitt: to do this hand matching process within our library table.
Rebecca Hewitt: So I spoke earlier about purchases. We also purchased things that you know, are requested, or that are
Rebecca Hewitt: needed for a large enrollment. Gen. LED. Classes. But we also focus quite a bit on uncovering and advertising the availability of materials that are already in the library's collection.
Brenda L Hazard: Hmm. Sorry, Corey. I just like to add one thing that I I didn't mention in my remarks, and I think it's important to bring up here. The library is recognized that student textbook costs are
Brenda L Hazard: unsustainable, and our reserve textbook collection is just one approach that we're using. So I think it's. I think it's important to just bring into the conversation that we've addressed
Brenda L Hazard: textbook affordability through our leadership with the our successful oer initiative here on campus. and most all of our math textbooks that used to be the primary subject area that was circulating
Brenda L Hazard: are now don't even exist in our collection, because we are successful in working with the math department, and most of those courses are now using oer. And that's true for psychology, and a number of other programs. So we're not just trying to bang away at by by continuing to collect ridiculously expensive textbooks. But we're trying to address the problem through oer as well.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And i'll say, all 4 campuses represented on this call are all among our leaders, and we are in Sunni. So you're all doing yeah multiple efforts in different directions to combat the textbook affordability crisis. So thank you all for that work and and
Cori Wilhelm: the folks on your campuses who do that. And again, we've we've mentioned quite a bit already about funding different initiatives from the student government, or administration.
Cori Wilhelm: But are there other funding sources? Anybody wants to mention here that you have not already.
Cori Wilhelm: and if so, i'll just let you unmute and go for it.
Cori Wilhelm: Is anybody using library budget? This may be a question as well.
Rebecca Hewitt: Yeah, here at Poly we're using grant funds and library budget and
Rebecca Hewitt: it I feel fine about that. I would much rather spend library collection dollars on materials, I know, for a fact. They are going to be used, and our
Rebecca Hewitt: textbook reserves are. you know, our highest circulation items, as we've already heard from the other panelists, so I feel fine about that.
Mary Jo Orzech: This is Mary Joe. We're taking a small part of of Grant funding that we received from faculty staff technology, grant to enhance open access in general and and and openly available materials. And we're using some of that for our E.
Mary Jo Orzech: Oh.
Mary Jo Orzech: e textbook kinds of materials as a pilot to start to move in that direction. And and we're hoping that that will be successful.
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah. At at Hudson Valley. We're using Sunni enrollment grant funds for this year's one time part of money for a textbook pilot along with some foundation funds for that purpose.
Cori Wilhelm: Yes. and just anything to add. You mentioned
Jess Spooner: administrative fund, the canton. And yeah, this year we got a grant. So we don't have the other funding. But i'm hoping that when that goes away we'll come back and have the administration on, because it's heavily supported on our campus. So I think
Jess Spooner: it's going to say.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and it sounds like it's a priority and all all of your can. So that yeah, all the campus see the need for this that's good to care. So marketing. We do have a couple of examples, so maybe i'll I'll go through each campus as we go through that. But we're just wondering how you're marketing this to students. And how do you students and faculty, as you mentioned? No.
Cori Wilhelm: what's available, and how to find it? And maybe you can kind of share what we've got here. So I think this one's from Poly Rebecca.
Rebecca Hewitt: Yes, we we do outreach via you know, every possible
Rebecca Hewitt: medium here on campus. But the most impactful outreach is directly to faculty
Rebecca Hewitt: with the faculty, telling their students directly the textbooks available in print at the library, or embedding a link to the E textbook
Rebecca Hewitt: in their syllabus and in their blackboard site.
Cori Wilhelm: And this is Camden Jeff.
Jess Spooner: So we have this on our, you know main library page, so they can go in and look at the textbooks we have available. But we also let students know when they're on their admissions, tours, and everything that you know. When they go on them. They tell them that's a selling point for parents, because they hear free textbooks and
Jess Spooner: like, oh, Canton has this, and that makes them excited. So this has our E textbook. It shows if we have
Jess Spooner: an older version, if it's available, if it's in how it's available. So this is how we show our students and
Jess Spooner: students just hear about this, and they start coming to use it because it's exciting to them to get a free textbook
Rebecca Hewitt: if I could. Just yeah point out one thing about Canton's spreadsheet. That's
Rebecca Hewitt: that just was just addressing. This is their entire textbook order. List. Right this isn't just
Rebecca Hewitt: textbooks that the library has. So that's really impressive that they've
Rebecca Hewitt: got their entire
Rebecca Hewitt: textbook order for the entire institution for one semester on this sheet.
Rebecca Hewitt: and not just, you know, picking out what the library has like. Find that to be incredible.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And and this she I'll just speak her. I came from Canton. She has been an evolution over the years, but it it takes a lot of work as as Rebecca mentioned a lot of manual labor hours.
Cori Wilhelm: but it is really useful because it's it's a Google sheet. So it can be updated live. But yeah, it's just no. The library doesn't have all the textbooks. Yes, they do have these and and links out to the the ebooks. And O, we are that are available. So.
Cori Wilhelm: And. Brenda, this is from.
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah. This is the Hudson Valley Subject Guide for reserve Textbooks. I'll put the link to it in the chat, and I think it's also.
Cori Wilhelm: Oh, Brenda, you mute it.
Cori Wilhelm: he said. I.
Brenda L Hazard: So we have this link to our main page. It's one of our most highly used guides, and we think it's really intuitive for students to use. So they don't have to try to muddle their way through our primo to try to find out if their textbook is on reserve.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, I think this is impressive as well. You're getting comments from the chat. This is fantastic. You can click right on the subject or the discipline, and it takes you to the books. It's fantastic
Cori Wilhelm: looking at ebooks next. Everybody, I think, has mentioned them a little bit. But if you want to talk about how how our ebooks happening at your library. Rebecca mentioned, looking at the collection you already own.
Cori Wilhelm: Are you purchasing what's happening? And we'll start this time, maybe with Mary Joe.
Cori Wilhelm: Oh, in my jury muted.
Mary Jo Orzech: Okay, all right. Oh, our our our textbooks are are
Mary Jo Orzech: marketed to students because we are still on a paper bound paper, a a beautiful binder that's at the circulation desk. And so it's how students are finding out about us.
Mary Jo Orzech: but it's very well used, and it is very user friendly, and we certainly are looking at hoping to move towards something like one of the other models that we're just shown. It'll be lovely to get some of that online
Mary Jo Orzech: the other way that it's that we're doing. Some of the marketing is by making sure that that it goes into our Daily eagle of a newsletter.
Mary Jo Orzech: What's the semester again gets out to faculty of individually. And so we're trying to promote it in a number of ways. This year we went and spoke to this Broadport student government, and so on.
Mary Jo Orzech: of about some of the the library services in general, including our ebooks services.
Mary Jo Orzech: and as I mentioned before, the ebooks are, are
we're trying to move towards purchasing more and more ebooks? But it's it's been a
Mary Jo Orzech: incremental kind of kind of problem issue for us as we move through.
Cori Wilhelm: Great thanks. Rebecca.
Rebecca Hewitt: As has already been mentioned, we, you know, really pivoted hard to ebooks during the pandemic.
Rebecca Hewitt: But Poly also has a lot of fully online students, and we have a campus in Albany. So ebooks just makes more sense for us, and
Rebecca Hewitt: we are delighted when we find needed ebooks in one of our packages, because if you have
Rebecca Hewitt: request and Epsco packages, those ebooks have an unlimited number of simultaneous users, which is a struggle for us when we have to buy an individual, he.
Rebecca Hewitt: So when we discover that there is an ebook available for library purchase that's needed
Rebecca Hewitt: for textbooks.
Rebecca Hewitt: you know. Then then we have to go through the checklist. What are the licensing terms that are available for that people purchase? In many, many cases we can only get 3 simultaneous users, in which case we have to buy multiple copies of it.
Rebecca Hewitt: so depending on the enrollment of that class. So there's sort of a lot of
Rebecca Hewitt: of balls in the air when it comes to buying books that are going to be used as class texts. We are delighted when we find them already in our one of our packages from Professor Epsco, but
Rebecca Hewitt: we have to purchase them. We do purchase them with grant funds or regular library collection funds.
Rebecca Hewitt: and, you know. make judgments about how many copies we need, how many simultaneous users we need.
Rebecca Hewitt: and you know, crossing our fingers that there's available availability. One more thing is that we've locked down our ebooks, particularly our request ebook, so that they can't be checked out in whole by one. User so all of our ebooks are only downloadable chapter by chapter, and that's to preserve their usefulness to the whole class.
Rebecca Hewitt: you know, for shared reserve purposes.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks, Jess. You want to speak about. Can't see books.
Jess Spooner: Sorry I've done you. Yeah, so we do everything that was mentioned here. But the other thing that I do is I set up. I use Epsco collection manager, and I make accounts for departments so like criminal justice, for example, has their own selector account, so they can go in. They can see what books would be useful for them.
Jess Spooner: and then they can reach out to me, and I can try to get those books for them. which I mean, I
Jess Spooner: 100% time get the books that they need, you know. If they're asking, then I know they're going to get used. But that's one thing I do to make it easier so they can see what actual ebooks are available out there for them to use.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And I think Ken has seen a lot of success with that I just mentioned criminal justice in particular. That faculty actually select their book sometimes based on what's available.
Cori Wilhelm: that that they've really made an impact on
Cori Wilhelm: student costs. And Brenda.
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah, so I could talk for an hour about this. But I'm. I'm trying to keep it to couple of minutes. So if you could advance this slide, Corey. So this is a where so reserve textbook circulation is gone over the past 5 years.
Brenda L Hazard: So I mentioned this earlier and remark my remarks, and you know, of course we expected Covid to hit us hard. So that's reflected in the fiscal year. 21 graph.
Brenda L Hazard: But still it doesn't account for. Well, yeah, that you know, we basically had hardly any reserve textbook circulation, and as you can see it really, Hasn't bounced back.
Brenda L Hazard: So when I was looking at this data in August of 22 at the end of the fiscal year I realized that we really had to transform our print based collection.
Brenda L Hazard: So it my my thoughts about that happen to coincide with receiving email from our Pro. Quest. Rep. Who described that on Mcgraw Hill
Brenda L Hazard: and some other traditional textbook vendors we're starting to make their books available through the pro quest, a book central platform.
Brenda L Hazard: So we I did a pilot, and we we purchased one title. You can advance this slide, Corey, if you don't mind, and we purchased one textbook, the one on here it's the well. It's towards the right hand side.
Brenda L Hazard: No, no, it isn't it's right in the middle understanding business, and this is for one of our 100 level business classes, and so we purchased the ebook that's published by Mcgraw Hill. Now
Brenda L Hazard: some of my colleagues on the call have described how they're purchasing ebooks from proquest and Epsco, but what we're finding here, Hudson Valley is our our faculty really want to use traditional textbooks
Brenda L Hazard: and Pearson and some gate represent most of the you know the majority of the textbooks that's their their publications, and they're not making their textbooks available to libraries through our traditional platforms. So I've focused on the Mcgraw Hill and a couple of other publishers.
Brenda L Hazard: and we got the under. We purchased the understanding business with our foundation funds and
Brenda L Hazard: the the Bar graph. Here the blue represents our E textbooks and their usage only so far this semester, so January and February, the and the orange is our physical textbooks the same title. So we had good experience with the understanding business textbook. The students liked it. The faculty member said she loved it because students had access immediately
Brenda L Hazard: from the very beginning of the the course, and we're much more engaged. Sounds a lot like our oer experience. Frankly, the problem was this textbook, with 3 user license cost over $600. So this is not something that's sustainable for us.
But we decided in As we approached spring semester
Brenda L Hazard: we purchased 6 more E textbooks, most of which were published by Mcgraw Hill, and representing a broad range of subjects. And you can see here in the first set, really phenomenal use, for this is our English Comp class.
Brenda L Hazard: and we're using a textbook called patterns. This is not a Mcgraw Hill. It's Bedford, published by Bedford, and we've had, as you can see, going on. You know, more than 200 uses of the E textbook, and you know, probably about 20 uses of the physical.
Brenda L Hazard: This also is really expensive. I think we paid. I think we've paid over $1,200 for 3 copies of this
Brenda L Hazard: again, really not sustainable, but something we're trying, and we're really delighted to see the student use on here. Let me just take a look at my notes.
Brenda L Hazard: The other one that doesn't show up here. I mentioned this in some other meeting back in the last year with Sunni is the book the color purple by Alice Walker, of course.
Brenda L Hazard: and we paid maybe $40 for that title a few years ago, and that's by farm, our highest use ebook, we, and so we're hoping to do more with that. But anyway, this gives you a little sense of what we're doing with with the textbooks, and
Brenda L Hazard: we're watching this carefully to see how we can grow it.
Cori Wilhelm: I'll stop there. That's great, Brenda, and that kind of brings us to assessing the impact. So Brenda is definitely tracking circulation and use and using that data to, you know, to kind of drive decisions on purchases.
Cori Wilhelm: How are you assessing your program, and how are you measuring its impact. Mary Joe?
Mary Jo Orzech: It was interesting that it was our friends group that actually said, we want to know what we you know we're giving you this money. We want to know what value we're getting out of it. So they've basically asked us to show us the stats show us how much use are you getting out of it? That was kind of a good good wake up, call for us. So we were able to provide that data that actually showing very similar what J. What Brenda Brenda just said
Mary Jo Orzech: the ebook usage is, is at least in recent years has definitely exceeded the print usage, although our print use is, we still get, do get good use from our our the print collection that we do have.
Mary Jo Orzech: I'm going to pivot just a slightly here, because I just noticed that Charles Alliance is on the call, and I have to give a shout out back to way back, when, because they were in on this so much earlier. This is really we're starting
Mary Jo Orzech: a next generation. But you be, and some of the folks at Cornell and other places started a much larger scale. E textbook program way back in 20
Mary Jo Orzech: twenty-
Mary Jo Orzech: well, 2,013. I can't even think of when it was. The point is.
Mary Jo Orzech: it was not quite sustainable either. But, boy, was it a good learning, good learning for us to break our teeth on? And so and so i'm very grateful for having had that experience because it is helping us as we're growing our home grown the smaller
Mary Jo Orzech: initiatives. I I I think it's been been a wonderful
Cori Wilhelm: yeah. And I like I like the collaboration across. We're all kind of learning learning this process together. Just any comments on how canton assesses their program
Jess Spooner: and we check our circulation. What's being used? The most? I will say that we have 71% of the textbooks on campus available for students to use. So
Jess Spooner: that's not how we assess it. But that's exciting number that we have that many available for student use.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And I think that figure could be
Cori Wilhelm: really influential in marketing, especially like you said to parents on Tours or open house. I would like to hear that. Yeah, Rebecca.
Rebecca Hewitt: Yeah, we Haven't had the opportunity to do anything very exciting. I know that
Rebecca Hewitt: you know the the literature on this topic often has sort of a dollar figure. This much has been saved by students through a we are through library availability of textbooks, that sort of thing. We haven't had the opportunity to do that. But we have, you know, looked closely at our circulation
Rebecca Hewitt: and our ebook usage, and you know it.
Rebecca Hewitt: Rough estimate that 80% of our front circulation and 80% of our ebook usage is tied to
Rebecca Hewitt: course materials.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and that that seems to be the case across. Many of the camps, as I speak to, is the highest circulating items in the library are
Cori Wilhelm: textbooks or E textbooks, Brenda any
Cori Wilhelm: more to add here?
Brenda L Hazard: No? Well, i'll just mention one thing that I don't as we don't assess, and i'd like to. And so maybe this is kind of a segue to the next slide. But looking forward, what i'd really like to do is to be able to look at our student data, to have more granular assessment
Brenda L Hazard: available to be able to determine.
Brenda L Hazard: You know the students who use our textbooks? Are they more likely to
Brenda L Hazard: to to
Brenda L Hazard: be retained? Retention? You know this is have an impact on retention for student success, and at this point I I don't have that kind of granular data, but I hope we might be able to get that in the future through some almost that, so i'll just leave it at that.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And I think in the in the broader, sunny library community we're really looking at how how libraries are impacting student success, and trying to, you know, draw those correlations between library use and library resources, and student success is certainly something like that would influence it.
Cori Wilhelm: So we do have another quick, full question. and I think we I already know the answer, based on a lot of the chat going on in the chat. But do you feel the library has a campus role in textbook access and affordability?
Cori Wilhelm: We we had this phrased a little bit different
Cori Wilhelm: like, do you feel it's the responsibility of the library, and I think the whole panel really felt like you know, it's not the responsibility of the library, but the library, maybe, has a role in that.
Cori Wilhelm: So it looks like most have responded. We'll give you another 3,
Cori Wilhelm: 2, one, and we'll share.
Cori Wilhelm: So a majority, but not not a a across the board consensus, but a majority of our participants do feel the library has a role in this does bring us
Cori Wilhelm: to the next part, and looking forward. So
Cori Wilhelm: it sounds like all of your programs are evolving.
Cori Wilhelm: They've all grown from some point of origin. But where do you see them heading? Are there opportunities? Other barriers?
Cori Wilhelm: What do you see for your feature? And maybe we'll start this time with Jack?
Jess Spooner: I think the biggest barrier for maintaining this program will be funding. you know, like if the funding stops like this year, I said, we got a grant, and if it doesn't go back to being funded by anybody on campus. Then
Jess Spooner: that could obviously
Jess Spooner: stop the program from moving forward. If we don't have the money.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, because it's not an inexpensive program, Mary Joe. Yeah.
Mary Jo Orzech: Yeah. I I think some of the barriers also lie with the whole traditional publisher.
Mary Jo Orzech: publisher, model that that still is of can be very
Mary Jo Orzech: can put up some real big barriers in terms of it's already been mentioned. Send gauge and and and so on. The folks who put in the access codes, you know, libraries, Aren't really able to access to to provide materials that way. I think there's other things coming down the pike that perhaps might mitigate some of this, but I
Mary Jo Orzech: I I think they're still of being able to to do things at scale is still a
Mary Jo Orzech: still a challenge.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks, Brenda.
Brenda L Hazard: Yeah. So you know the cost. Just the shared cost of the traditional textbooks in etext format is definitely a barrier to what we can do. We're looking also, you know, on my campus. Our bookstore is being protected
Brenda L Hazard: by our administration that the the bookstore provides a huge amount of funding for
Brenda L Hazard: student activities, and we're not trying to kill the bookstore either through oer or through our physical print collection. So we're always mindful of that sacred cow.
Brenda L Hazard: and that's a little bit limiting frankly.
Brenda L Hazard: Let's see. I guess I i'll stop there, and then we're not talking about opportunities yet. Right? Did we? Just talking about barriers?
Brenda L Hazard: You can go ahead and and speak to opportunities as well. Yes, okay. So i'll just throw out a few other ideas and initiatives we have going on here at Hpcc. Regarding textbooks.
Brenda L Hazard: One of them is, we're looking at extended loans. I know that's not very sexy, but it's a small thing. Students don't come to campus all the time. So we're thinking about shifting from in house only to allowing one week loans of textbooks
Brenda L Hazard: again not very exciting, but kind of a reality. We're also looking at control digital lending for the future. And I know some of you are our leaders in that, and i'm really interested in hoping we'll have a spotlight for campuses doing Cdl, and that could get at providing chapters to students electronically. So that might be something we'll be doing in the future.
Another initiative that we have going on. That relates that kind of bridges oer, and this conversation is, our English department
Brenda L Hazard: is engaged with the library right now, and coming up with reading banks. That's the term. It's a new term to me. It came out of Columbus State Community College, and it's the idea that faculty are going to give us reading lists, and we're going to determine if we have access to these
Brenda L Hazard: through our through our online resources and provide linked lists, kind of like what you saw with our subject guide for reserve textbooks.
Brenda L Hazard: but it would be at a more granular course based level. So again get shifting away from having a print copy of a textbook. Here the students might be using an oer, and then doing reading that we have, we're making really easily available to them. So that's a new initiative I'm: excited about.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, I like that idea. Rebecca. Any barriers or opportunities. You see, a poly.
Rebecca Hewitt: the the biggest barrier is the availability of ebooks. I mean, as we said, so many publishers are not making ebooks available
Rebecca Hewitt: on the terms that libraries need them, and and we're regularly getting messages from faculty and students with, you know, a screenshot of
Rebecca Hewitt: the Amazon sale page for a particular book which has an electronic option and saying, Why can't the library
Rebecca Hewitt: add this ebook. and you know
Rebecca Hewitt: it's not made available on the basis that the library needs? Then you can't get it so that I I mean we. We would really be buying more like ebooks if we could, and they're just not available. We
Rebecca Hewitt: always choose the ebook option when it's possible.
Rebecca Hewitt: And then, you know, funding. We've been lucky so far, and hope that that will continue. I'd like justice idea of soliciting textbook donations from students I love that, and hope to implement that here
Rebecca Hewitt: I haven't given credit to the students and faculty that have been donating books to us already. So I need to do that.
Rebecca Hewitt: One thing that has happened at Poly in recent years is that our bookstore went fully online. The bookstore contract changed from fall it to Academos, which is a fully online bookstore, and that
Rebecca Hewitt: actually helped us, because when we had a physical bookstore on campus, and we got Grant funding from auxiliary services. We had to buy print books at full cost from the bookstore. But now that the bookstore is no longer located on campus and operates only online.
Rebecca Hewitt: We can use those phones in any way we want, so that that has been helpful.
Cori Wilhelm: And we do have about 10 or 11 min now for questions it looks like in the chat. A lot of campuses have commented that they do dedicate library funds
Cori Wilhelm: because it is an important priority for them. And then a lot of campus is also commented.
Cori Wilhelm: It is a very manual process sometimes to try to eyes and match or title search. I'm. I'm like my brain's thinking. Some kind of computer programmer
Cori Wilhelm: can come up with, You know, some solution for that, because it sounds like quite a few campuses
Cori Wilhelm: have the same problems. So if if anyone has questions, please raise your hand or through them in the chat, or if you just want to share what your campus is doing. It sounds like we've heard from a few folks.
Cori Wilhelm: Rene. It sounds like your program is going well. Is that it? To you? Go, I think.
Renee Schmidt: Hi, Yes, sorry. Yeah. Commute C, the Community college, and it's definitely developing. Still, we have a lot of
Renee Schmidt: things that we have not yet. What's the worried I want like
Renee Schmidt: really made a good system for it. We're still kind of
Renee Schmidt: just
Renee Schmidt: struggling with it a little bit, each semester and trying to get the word out to professors. And
Renee Schmidt: oh, yeah, this is available for your class. We've we're also we have. We've started participating
Renee Schmidt: with the overdrive subscription through the and I was an and Ly: N: yeah. So and you know, so promoting mostly it's English
Renee Schmidt: books for English classes through that as well as another avenue to get either a ebook or E audiobook of it and make those available to.
Renee Schmidt: So it's definitely a work in progress.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, anyone else want to share or have questions for the group or for each other. Or did you learn something?
Cori Wilhelm: It looks like Lisa and Justin have both added some
Cori Wilhelm: comments.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and Justin, and seeing that Erie the same thing as Brenda at Hudson Valley that reserves have dropped off.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and I know
Cori Wilhelm: we presented a few different models for ebook collecting, so that maybe an option of print reserves. Aren't happening.
Cori Wilhelm: And, Lisa, are you at NASA, I think.
Cori Wilhelm: where it sets your your funding and support disappeared.
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: Yes, I'm. At at NASA.
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: So you you still have your program. We do Well, we had like one of the top textbook reserve collections. We had every textbook available to our students, and this circulation was, you know, outrageous. It was a a wonderfully popular collection, but during 2020, with a lot of budget cuts
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: our administration who had supported it, decided not to support it anymore. So we're struggling to provide this collection in some sort of format.
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: But i'm happy to be on this call because I'm: I'm. Now thinking more, maybe I should. We focus more on E text
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: and less on the print. I I do try to get as many as I can, but i'm I'm having a lot of difficulty with that.
Lisa Errico, NCC Library: But it it's hopeful, and I appreciate everybody's comments.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and I will. When I post the slides. We do have some resources to share. That will be clickable on this slide, but we'll also share everyone's email. If you've got questions, you know these folks may be the right people to ask
Cori Wilhelm: so jealous. At maritime they've seen a drop in request from faculty to place. Things on reserve is that in the case across the board.
Cori Wilhelm: on your campuses as well?
Cori Wilhelm: And then Lucy at Tompkins Courtland has.
Lucy Yang: Is this a purchase on Demand Model Lucy, for your reserve books
Lucy Yang: mit
Lucy Yang: we don't go out and buy every textbook, but if a patron
Lucy Yang: we'll ask for it, we will go and get it, and then we share it out with a faculty member. And we're like we'll send them an email. We'll send the student an email, and Usually it's something we can get in a day or so. It's. It's pretty quick, and then that way. We know that that textbook will definitely get used.
Lucy Yang: and then the instructor will will share it out to their class as well. And then it seems to work out pretty well.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and that's a good idea. I think, when you do have a limited budget, because you don't want to be purchasing an expensive book and then have it not be
Lucy Yang: exactly yeah, and so does our student request You said
Lucy Yang: Yes.
Cori Wilhelm: yes.
Cori Wilhelm: he does also seem to drop
Cori Wilhelm: Justin's asking you about the red shell collection from Paula.
Cori Wilhelm: I think, during Covid Red Shelf did a lot of
Cori Wilhelm: really helpful work in making their textbooks available, but that got shut right off
Cori Wilhelm: when Covid ended, or when it I don't even know it
Cori Wilhelm: when we all return to to campus.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. So Andy's asking about the relationship with the bookstore. Mary Joe and Rebecca both mentioned getting textbook list from their bookstore, and I think Canton does the same.
Cori Wilhelm: Can you speak to that? This your bookstore? Are they happy about giving you this?
Mary Jo Orzech: Hi! This is Mary Joe. Our textbook store has had a lot of turnover, so it's been developing new relationships with the new people every almost a quick.
Mary Jo Orzech: quite often, and that actually has worked in our favor because we could. We keep telling? Well, the last bookstore manager was able to get it for us. So we we're asking you for the same thing. And at this point I think they do have a the first time, I think was tough, but one, now that they have a of
Mary Jo Orzech: a report done in this, they can just run the same report for the height enrollment textbooks. We have the
Mary Jo Orzech: top 20. Now we're asking for the top 50, because we have acquired exhausted the first list, and and they do turn over as well. So. But it is manual, and it does take time, and it isn't you know it isn't exhaustive, so it but it but it's a interesting way to try to develop
Mary Jo Orzech: connections with the bookstore if they can at least give you that to hold in of, you know. Could you? Just you know we're helping you out? We're gonna buy books from you. If you tell us the top 20 books you have to sell, so it's it's a little. It's a little win.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And I think if you buy them from the bookstore they they might be more willing to help you out. Go ahead, Rebecca.
Rebecca Hewitt: Yeah, I was just gonna say that we Haven't experienced any resistance or push back from our new textbook vendor. We make that request our previous bookstore Fall. It used to send us a Pdf.
Rebecca Hewitt: Of the textbook list, which was much more difficult to work with. We currently get just a spreadsheet, which is much, much easier, but there has on the part of either vendor there was. There was no resistance.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, and Jill is asking if anyone has trouble getting a list, and I know at least I can't say it used to be a real problem only because the faculty didn't get their adoptions in on time.
Cori Wilhelm: and I think
they've ironed that out a lot in the in the new system. It's better.
Cori Wilhelm: It looks like Barnes and noble campuses are pretty happy to send the spreadsheet.
Cori Wilhelm: NASA gets it from fall it
Brenda L Hazard: we get it from our bookstore, and then, of course, I think every bookstore has to make the textbook information public to students. So we do that, too, to see if there's updates. That's more difficult, because you have to go in course, by course. But that's an option.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, certainly, the way you get it impacts how much work on the library? And so you know that an editable spreadsheet as far as Rebecca mentioned, I think it's easiest.
Cori Wilhelm: We've just a few minutes left Any more questions from the group on, please or from the audience. Please feel free to
Cori Wilhelm: drop them in the chat.
Cori Wilhelm: I'm like Brenda, I could talk textbooks all day. This is something i'm very passionate about, and have worked toward for years.
Cori Wilhelm: Go ahead, Justin.
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): either. Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation. I just
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): I was thinking about like the textbook list and working on who we are. Just.
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): It's been really. I find that our bookstores lists are really inaccurate. And
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): i'm just curious if if you're finding that similar at other places, that those.
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): of course. you know those textbook lists are actually
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): not accurate, because the people are
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): letting the bookstore know what they're using. It's been hard to, you know, for in terms of where to track what
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): people are actually using. So I mean, we're getting. We're having a hard time with.
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): you know, tracking stats for oer usage, but also trying to figure out what our
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): you know. Courses are actually even using.
Justin Cronise (Erie CC): I'm. Curious if anyone else is having that as well.
Mary Jo Orzech: Yes, this is Mary Joe. We have to Sam. Go double back and sample. Some of our, you know, make a couple of phone calls actually out to the faculty and say, this is the bookstore things you're using is this really are you still using this, or a lot of times? The instructors have changed at the last minute, and you know, Haven't necessarily aren't using the same materials.
Mary Jo Orzech: So yes, it is a little bit of a it's not it's not a full-proof system by any means
Rebecca Hewitt: on our campus. We have a lot of bookstore versus library confusion.
Rebecca Hewitt: and we need to be very careful about not
Rebecca Hewitt: soliciting textbook orders from the faculty because they'll send them to us and think we're that that they're sending them to the bookstore, and then not place the order with the bookstore. So
Rebecca Hewitt: we had a little bit of a mess of that one semester and stopped doing it, except
Rebecca Hewitt: with the faculty that we're particularly friendly with and and work with a lot. But you know we have students
Rebecca Hewitt: and phone calls all the time into the library with people thinking that we're the bookstore. So I don't know if that's a a modern phenomenon or not, but it. It is affected us in a couple of ways. If that's in textbooks is one of them.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And a few books that had to jump on. But yeah, Jill says they're really struggling at optometry. The the instructors don't always update, and yes, I I hear that, Jill.
Cori Wilhelm: And so you spend all this time looking for syllabi. Jess? Renee asked about the Esco.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, we we're talking in the oh, that you got it. Okay.
Cori Wilhelm: Okay. And this is saying, maybe a follow up. Yeah, it sounds like people do want to chat about this a lot, so we can maybe do a follow up session.
Cori Wilhelm: and maybe maybe even do some demos on the ebook acquisition the ISP and matching in the
Cori Wilhelm: the Eco collection manager, you know, looking at different vendors.
Cori Wilhelm: So yeah, we're just about at a time. I'm going to stop.