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'And We Also Have It Online': Cultivating an Etextbook Collection in a Community College Library

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Title: 'And We Also Have It Online': Cultivating an Etextbook Collection in a Community College Library
Language: English
Authors: Julia Furay
Source: New Review of Academic Librarianship. 2024 30(1):92-105.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 14
Publication Date: 2024
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education
Postsecondary Education
Two Year Colleges
Descriptors: Community Colleges, Academic Libraries, Textbook Publication, Electronic Publishing, Student Costs, COVID-19, Pandemics, School Closing, Library Services, Barriers, Librarians, Undergraduate Study, Access to Information, Open Educational Resources, Library Materials, Unit Costs, Library Role, Electronic Libraries, Financial Support
Geographic Terms: New York (New York)
DOI: 10.1080/13614533.2024.2328779
ISSN: 1361-4533
1740-7834
Abstract: This case study details how a community college library, in response to rising textbook costs and COVID-related closures, advocated for and received an increase in funding to provide online copies of many textbooks in its reserve collection. It also provides a glimpse into the roadblocks acquisitions librarians might encounter in trying to bolster online textbook collections, such as licensing issues, expense, and loan periods. The initiative resulted in a major expansion of access to etextbooks, particularly lower undergraduate titles from large textbook publishers. The new etextbooks varied greatly in popularity. Circulation statistics of print textbooks are presented along with usage data for etextbooks for the first year of this initiative. Initial statistics illustrate the potential popularity of etextbooks and also show the need for further investigation about which disciplines are best served by etextbook access, and how best to raise awareness of these titles for professors as well as students.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2024
Accession Number: EJ1426491
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0177456430;rfw01jan.24;2024May28.05:45;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0177456430-1">"And we also have it online": cultivating an etextbook collection in a community college library </title> <p>This case study details how a community college library, in response to rising textbook costs and Covid-related closures, advocated for and received an increase in funding to provide online copies of many textbooks in its reserve collection. It also provides a glimpse into the roadblocks acquisitions librarians might encounter in trying to bolster online textbook collections, such as licensing issues, expense, and loan periods. The initiative resulted in a major expansion of access to etextbooks, particularly lower undergraduate titles from large textbook publishers. The new etextbooks varied greatly in popularity. Circulation statistics of print textbooks are presented along with usage data for etextbooks for the first year of this initiative. Initial statistics illustrate the potential popularity of etextbooks and also show the need for further investigation about which disciplines are best served by etextbook access, and how best to raise awareness of these titles for professors as well as students.</p> <p>Keywords: etextbooks; library acquisitions; reserves; textbooks</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-2">Introduction</hd> <p>Financial difficulties for university students can come in many forms, such as food and housing insecurity, family responsibilities, transportation costs, or university-related fees. These challenges can take their toll on academic outcomes. For example, students reported accepting the risk of lower grades to avoid paying for expensive textbooks (Senack, [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref1">35</reflink>]). Data also indicates that family income is strongly correlated with degree completion (Bailey & Dynarski, [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>]). The problem is even more acute in relation to community colleges. Students at these institutions—particularly students of color—are at greater risk of food and housing insecurity (Goldrick-Rab et al., [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref3">19</reflink>]). Community colleges have a disproportionate share of nontraditional students with family or work obligations, who often face additional barriers to success, such as academic preparedness, lack of family support, and financial difficulties (Brock, [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref4">8</reflink>]).</p> <p>Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic has made life even more financially precarious for many students (Jaeger et al., [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref5">22</reflink>]; Rodríguez-Planas, [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref6">31</reflink>]). At the same time, education itself changed, given the skyrocketing numbers of universities that pivoted to online course offerings. According to the National Center for Education Statistics ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref7">27</reflink>]), students enrolled in distance education courses spiked from 36.3% in 2019 to 73.4% in 2020. Many university libraries closed their doors for over a year, eliminating access to their print collections altogether. Including, of course, print textbooks. Students suffering from financial difficulties had no good options: many could neither afford textbooks nor access them for free from their university library.</p> <p>The City University of New York (CUNY) presents a particularly striking example of students facing difficulties. CUNY, an urban university with 25 colleges throughout New York City's five boroughs, has long advertised itself as an impactful force in helping students move up the economic ladder (CUNY, [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref8">11</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref9">12</reflink>]). Indeed, studies from the Brookings Institution (Reber & Sinclair, [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref10">29</reflink>]) and Third Way (Itzkowitz, [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref11">21</reflink>]) both show CUNY schools rank high in economic mobility by bringing students into the middle class. Minority enrollment in CUNY community colleges is high: in Fall 2019, community college enrollment data shows that 38.1% of enrolled students identified as Hispanic, 29.3% identified as Black, and 17.0% as Asian/Pacific Islander (CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref12">14</reflink>]). Affordable tuition rates, in addition to Pell grants and other financial assistance, are vitally important for CUNY students. A 2016 analysis revealed that sixty percent report an annual household income of less than $30,000 (CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref13">13</reflink>]). At CUNY, financial difficulties can manifest in acute food insecurity, which affects student ability to learn and focus in the classroom (Ilieva et al., [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref14">20</reflink>]).</p> <p>With that in mind, it is clear that textbook costs at CUNY throw up roadblocks to our students. Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, one of CUNY's seven community colleges, presents a good illustration of this struggle. Searching the campus bookstore website reveals the median price to purchase one of the spring 2022 semester's print textbooks was $106. To save money, students could also shop around online, rent textbooks or buy used, but the expense can still be significant, particularly for students with food or housing insecurity. As Bell ([<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]) notes: "Even reasonably priced books may be more than what economically fragile families can manage." Martin et al. ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref16">26</reflink>]) found in a survey that many students elect to drop or withdraw from courses when they can't afford the assigned textbooks, and also pointed out that though textbook costs are much lower than tuition and housing costs, "student access to and engagement with course materials is essential to academic achievement" (p. 125). Many Kingsborough and CUNY librarians, as well as disciplinary faculty, are actively advocating for more professors to adopt open educational resources, or OERs (Blick & Marcus, [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref17">4</reflink>]; Brandle et al., [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref18">7</reflink>]; Van Allen & Katz, [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref19">38</reflink>]). However, traditional textbooks from academic publishers still represent the vast majority of those assigned at Kingsborough. The library, therefore, considers it a responsibility to maintain a robust textbook collection.</p> <p>Our reserve collection—the busiest department of the library and anecdotally our most popular offering with students—has long been an area of innovation within the Kingsborough library, recently documented by Noe ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref20">28</reflink>]) and Delgado ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref21">16</reflink>]). Our prior initiatives had been focused on providing free print textbooks to our students on a long-term basis. Noe reported on the library's grant-funded experiment with providing students textbooks on semester-long loans, while Delgado created giveaway events for recently weeded textbooks. However, ebooks were never a priority. The reason was partially organizational. For many years the reserve collection at Kingsborough was entirely run by the circulation department, who purchased the titles in print based on lists shared by the campus bookstore. Electronic textbook purchasing was minimal; these titles were selected on a sporadic basis by the electronic resources librarian and completely separated from the print reserve purchasing process. Additionally, students had long been open about their preference for textbooks in print, so we focused our energies there. Then came the Covid pandemic, and the library closed its doors for 18 months. Our popular print textbook collection was suddenly unavailable altogether. At the same time, a restructuring brought both reserve and ebook purchasing under the auspices of the collection development department of the library. Allocating a chunk of the reserves budget to online textbooks suddenly became simpler, and a major library priority.</p> <p>All this—the particular financial difficulties of community college students, the mixture of hybrid, online and in-person classes at many universities, the open access movement, and the increasing availability of electronic textbooks from traditional academic publishers—make now a very interesting time for acquisitions librarians. This paper will use the Kingsborough library's initiative to provide more electronic textbooks, or etextbooks, as a case study, in the hopes that this narrative will help other libraries and librarians who are looking to expand their electronic textbook offerings for their students. I will also present some initial data on how the first year of this initiative fared: like their print counterparts, we had electronic textbooks that were wildly popular and others that were completely ignored.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-3">Literature review</hd> <p>Scholarship on ebooks in academic libraries is an extensive and diverse area of study, but comparatively few articles focus on etextbooks specifically. However, it is certainly a growing area of interest. A systematic review of ebook usage in academic libraries from Blummer and Kenton ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref22">5</reflink>]) found that "students were more apt to use ebooks that were linked to course materials" (p. 100), which most librarians would find unsurprising. The biggest problem with academic libraries providing electronic textbooks to their students may well be the lack of available titles. In Bell's words, "the issue was not about budgets or collection policies but, rather, was a simple inability to buy the books. Librarians cannot buy what no publisher will sell them." Furthermore, as Georgas ([<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref23">18</reflink>]) noted, many online course materials are available through subscriptions rather than individual purchases, meaning they could be removed when a license expires.</p> <p>Since many publishers have not made most of their traditional textbooks available for libraries to license, librarians have had to come up with creative solutions to help students struggling with textbook costs. The most sustainable long-term solution is, as mentioned earlier, advocating for and creating open educational materials. In addition to that, however, libraries have also undertaken various initiatives to purchase course-adopted texts that aren't marketed as textbooks by publishers (Boczar & Pascual, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref24">6</reflink>]; Carr et al., [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref25">9</reflink>]; Riha & LeMay, [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref26">30</reflink>]). As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, some libraries scanned their own textbooks and loaned them out digitally in accordance with the controlled digital lending (CDL) method, an approach which allows for a library to loan their own books digitally in place of their inaccessible physical copies (Currier & Centivany, [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref27">15</reflink>]; Dinkins, [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref28">17</reflink>]). Eventually, publishers began to slowly offer more traditional textbooks for library license; those who could do so then began to purchase limited-user licenses for traditional textbooks (Kiriakova, [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref29">25</reflink>]; Scott et al., [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref30">33</reflink>]). Unlimited user access textbooks remain rare, however.</p> <p>Another factor in the slow adoption of etextbooks in reserve collections may well be student reluctance to use the format. Ji et al. ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref31">23</reflink>]) as well as Chavali and Gundala ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref32">10</reflink>]) examined student experiences and perceptions of etextbooks. Both studies found that students tended to prefer print books, but often chose to purchase electronic textbooks and other course materials because they are typically more affordable as a format. Abuloum et al. ([<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref33">1</reflink>]), who surveyed students at their own university, found that nearly two-thirds preferred print over electronic textbooks, and those who used print textbooks seemed to use them more often than those who used etextbooks. Librarians who have examined student attitudes toward ebooks reported student frustration based on technical difficulties (Rojeski, [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref34">32</reflink>]), digital rights management (DRM) restrictions which limit printing and downloading options (Boczar & Pascual, [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref35">6</reflink>]; Seiden & McColl, [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref36">34</reflink>]; Slater, [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref37">37</reflink>]), or eye strain (Shi et al., [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref38">36</reflink>]). Dinkins ([<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref39">17</reflink>]) unfavorably compared the ease of use for public library platforms such as OverDrive with the comparatively complicated process required for Ebook Central and Ebsco. Both Johnston and Ferguson ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref40">24</reflink>]) and Shi et al. found in local surveys that students did not frequently use interactive ebook features such as highlighting or online note-taking. Conversely, Scott et al.'s survey of faculty after a pilot project providing etextbook access to students showed mostly positive responses to the additional access, with many faculty both praising library etextbooks for enhancing equity. Their survey also showed faculty were willing to further collaborate with librarians on selection.</p> <p>Given the relatively recent availability of online textbooks from traditional large publishers, there is a gap in the literature on the experience of academic libraries bolstering their etextbook collection. This article is intended to add to this conversation by documenting one library's early challenges and successes in this area, and to suggest potential areas of research interest moving forward.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-4">Advocating for electronic access</hd> <p>In describing the textbook access issues at Kingsborough, this paper will use data compiled from the campus bookstore and CUNYFirst, the university's course management system. It's important to note that faculty assigning OERs do not always submit these titles to CUNYFirst, so this description of textbooks at Kingsborough should be considered incomplete. That said, one can see the problem immediately when presented with the numbers. In the spring of 2021—before our project began—the Kingsborough library owned a total of 27 electronic textbooks out of the 235 titles on that semester's bookstore list. An additional 30 titles were available electronically through the Internet Archive's CDL database. At the time, these ebooks were visible in the library catalog and students could access them if they wanted to create an Internet Archive account. This outside access was perhaps better than nothing, but the low scan quality (as well as the hassle of creating an additional account) meant that our students were rarely interested in these formats. And indeed, the Internet Archive titles were eventually removed from the catalog altogether. In any case, the vast majority of our textbooks were completely unavailable to our students in either print or online formats. During the library closure, our phone and email reference services fielded many requests for textbooks, and in most cases we had to tell our students we simply couldn't help them.</p> <p>Motivated by this, we researched possibilities for expanding access to electronic textbooks. For better or worse, we did not approach this project with specific research objectives per se. Rather, our simple goal was to greatly expand online access to course texts. At the beginning of the project, our questions were of a practical nature:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Could we get the funding for this initiative from the college administration?</item> <p></p> <item> How many licenses could we buy, and where should we prioritize funding?</item> <p></p> <item> Once purchased, how would we get the word out about our new etextbook collection?</item> <p></p> <item> Would students continue to prefer print textbooks to etextbooks, as they had in the past?</item> </ulist> <p>We began by tackling the first two questions. Naturally, the answer to the second question depended on the first. Our budget allocation was extremely scant during the library closure, so this was an area that required buy-in from our administration. Ideally, we would like to have purchased an electronic copy of each title in our reserve collection. However, this was clearly wishful thinking. As discussed in the literature review, many textbooks are not made available for libraries to license electronically, including a majority of assigned textbooks. Some of those that are available might have exorbitant pricing models that make them an unreasonable option. Therefore, we researched cost and licensing information, the loan frequency of each print textbook (pre-Covid), and how many sections of each course used a particular title.</p> <p>Then we presented our case to the college provost, complete with detailed potential spending tiers depending on how many textbooks we might purchase, and what kind of user licenses we would buy for each title. We presented a number of scenarios which represented a broad range in potential budgetary allocations:</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> The most expensive scenario would be, of course, to purchase all available electronic versions of textbooks currently in the Kingsborough reserve collection, and to purchase the maximum number of user licenses for each title. Though a thorough solution, this would take enormous budgetary outlay, and the reserves collection had not (up to that point) been recently weeded. Therefore this approach would waste funding on unused titles.</item> <p></p> <item> Perhaps more practically, we could simply purchase at least one user license for each textbook assigned for that semester, assuming they were available for library purchase from the publisher. This would require additional purchases in later semesters for any courses not offered.</item> <p></p> <item> If funding did not permit us to purchase all titles assigned that semester, we would use pre-pandemic circulation data, as well as the number of sections in each course, to buy licenses for the most popular textbooks in our collection. We had already compiled this data, and could quickly determine the probable titles which would be most popular with our students.</item> </ulist> <p>The provost did not ultimately decide which approach was best, but did agree to increase our funding for the reserves collection to support our goal of bolstering both ebook and print resources. Overall, we were allocated $50,000 in the fall of 2021 to spend on both print and electronic textbooks. Thanks to our research, we already knew that purchasing an ebook license for every available assigned textbook (or option 2 above) would cost at least half that. The remainder would go toward the print reserve collection. Print titles were once again essential, as a percentage of students returned to campus for in-person instruction in September 2021 (and as noted, many titles were not available for ebook licensing). As stated earlier, the goal at this point was to get students access to both print and online copies of assigned textbooks whenever possible.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-5">The process</hd> <p>The unfortunate truth is that libraries dealing with textbook purchasing face something of an uphill battle. The confusion of frequent new editions, access cards, looseleaf editions, custom editions, brief editions, out-of-print titles, and inaccurate ISBNs is perhaps a subject for another paper. Suffice to say, though, electronic textbooks present yet another challenge. We had to make certain the licensable edition was the exact same as the one assigned by faculty; we had to decide on which user license to purchase; and we had to check every title for changes in price and license availability since that spring. In several cases, a recent (but not current) edition was available to license. Ideally, we'd have liked to contact professors to ascertain whether or not an earlier edition would suffice if the current was not available. However, we did not have the time to do so. We therefore elected not to purchase any earlier editions.</p> <p>During the fall, winter, spring and summer semesters of the 2021–2022 academic year, a total of 307 textbooks were assigned. With new editions and new titles for the new academic year, we started with licenses for just 9 of that year's textbooks. Ultimately we purchased etextbook licenses for 82 titles. The remaining 216 titles were unavailable for electronic licensing. Generally, we purchased the license with the greatest number of users, though certain titles were only available as single user licenses. For some popular titles, we also purchased multiple licenses, for a total of 94 purchases.</p> <p>By the spring of 2022, we had electronic access to 62 of the 217 titles on that semester's list from the bookstore. This more than doubled the online access from the previous spring, but still represented less than a third of the total. In most cases, we purchased licenses from our vendors, though four of the titles were available freely as open educational resources or had aged into public domain. (Again, as we were working from the bookstore-generated list at this time, it must be acknowledged that many additional open access titles would not have been listed here.) Naturally, we would have liked to purchase more, but we were hamstrung by the fact that no licenses were available for custom editions or Kingsborough faculty-authored textbooks. Instead, the titles available to license are mostly lower-division undergraduate texts aimed at a broad audience, such as general introductions to chemistry, sociology, or psychology.</p> <p>Tables 1 and 2 should be considered a snapshot of a moment in time in purchasing online textbooks, but may give a sense of what is currently available, and what kind of investments these initiatives would currently require.</p> <p>Table 1. Access to 2021<bold>–</bold>2022 reserve titles.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Course texts assigned, 21–22</td><td char=".">307</td></tr><tr><td>Course texts owned in print, 21–22</td><td char=".">292</td></tr><tr><td>Course texts licensed as ebooks, 21–22</td><td char=".">91</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>Table 2. Etextbook prices, 2021–2022.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td /><td>Licenses purchased</td></tr><tr><td /><td>One-user</td><td>Three-user</td><td>Unlimited users</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Titles purchased</td><td char=".">43</td><td char=".">44</td><td char=".">7</td></tr><tr><td>Average price</td><td>$208.90</td><td>$441.22</td><td>$119.50</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>If it seems puzzling that unlimited user licenses can cost less than three-user, the mystery is explained to some extent when looking at the seven titles available for unlimited user licenses, which were generally either older editions still used by faculty or topic overviews such as <emph>A Short History of Islamic Thought</emph>, rather than traditional textbooks.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-6">A print and online reserves collection</hd> <p>Now that we had purchased a bigger selection of electronic textbooks, we wanted to let students and professors know they were there. The next question, as stated earlier, was how best to get the word out. As a short-term solution we set up a simple LibGuide to document exactly which of that semester's textbooks were now available as ebooks. Then we sent an all-faculty email to alert them that we now had a number of popular textbooks available online, advising them to check the LibGuide or to contact us for further information. The longer-term approach was an overdue integration of course reserves with our library content management system (CMS), so students could more easily find both print and online textbooks for their courses by simply searching for their course, instructor name, or textbook title in our library catalog. Adding this information would also allow us to have data ready and waiting for any more targeted outreach projects in the future. As a pilot project in the summer of 2022, we also compiled a mail merge email to each active professor with details on the number of print copies and ebook users for each textbook they assigned that semester. This initiative was more straightforward in the summer session, given the smaller number of courses, and it remains to be seen whether it is a sustainable practice in future semesters. This represents the full extent of our marketing for this collection for the 2021–2022 school year. Students logging into the bookstore website or visiting the campus bookstore would see print copies and access cards for their assigned textbook available for purchase, but unless their professors informed them or they proactively sought out the library, they would not have known they also might have free online access to these same titles.</p> <p>Additional decisions as well as continued monitoring were important after acquisition of these textbooks. In purchasing these titles, we used several different ebook vendors, which led to a lot of variation in default loan periods. Our print reserve books are 4-h loans within the library, but in the case of ebooks, this loan period seemed too short to prove useful to our students. We began with seven-day loan periods with the idea that students would in most cases look at the ebooks online due to the hassle of installing another application (Adobe Digital Editions) to view downloaded ebooks. This estimation proved to be incorrect, and we were quickly beset with turnaway notifications and panicked emails from professors asking us to purchase additional licenses. We quickly adjusted the loan period to one day, and whenever possible we kept one copy of each etextbook available for online use. In theory, at least one user should always be able to access the title. In discussions with vendors, however, it seems that a shorter loan period is likely to be mandated by the platforms in the future, bringing us back to a 4-h loan period for both print and ebook textbooks.</p> <p>After a full year with both print and electronic access to many of our textbook titles, we can begin to compile preliminary data on the success of our electronic textbook initiative. It is too early for a thorough analysis, especially because current print circulation statistics have not yet rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers. So while we can't definitively answer our final research question, we can begin to address it and examine patterns. The data below were compiled from two separate sources: physical loan statistics for reserve textbooks were gathered from our library CMS analytics portal. Usage statistics from our electronic textbooks, on the other hand, were compiled directly from our vendors (Ebook Central, Ebsco, and Jstor). Since the vendors provide usage numbers in various formats, the simplest way to coordinate the numbers is to simply count the views for each book. The numbers are not intended to represent a holistic assessment of our etextbook initiative, which would require a much closer look at the data. After our first year of large-scale etextbook purchasing, we simply wanted to know if the collection was being used much yet.</p> <p>Table 3 shows many print books did not circulate at all, unsurprising in a year in which so many classes were held online. However, a certain number of books had over ten loans (or views), which is accurate if incomplete, because some of these ebooks had dozens or even hundreds of views and downloads. For Table 4, we consider loans and views for textbooks by discipline. For clarity, the numbers below represent only course-assigned titles for which we have purchased both print copies and online licenses; circulation data for titles without ebook access are not included. For librarians considering where to allocate limited funding, these numbers may be informative, though context is essential. Ebook views and print loans may be more a result of which instructors have promoted these resources in class, and which courses are online or in person, than the subject matter itself. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest that the availability of ebooks has become a benefit to several disciplines at Kingsborough.</p> <p>Table 3. Circulation and access statistics for all assigned course texts during the 2021–2022 academic year.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td /><td>Titles with no loans</td><td>Titles with 1–10 loans</td><td>Titles with 11+ loans</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>2021–2022 assigned print textbooks (Total 292 owned of 307 assigned)</td><td char=".">174</td><td char=".">100</td><td char=".">18</td></tr><tr><td /><td>Titles with no views</td><td char=".">Titles with 1–10 views</td><td>Titles with 11+ views</td></tr><tr><td>2021–2022 assigned etextbooks (Total 91 owned of 307 assigned)</td><td char=".">39</td><td char=".">30</td><td char=".">22</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>1 <emph>Note:</emph> The numbers below represent print titles with no online access as well as those with licensed ebook versions of these texts.</p> <p>Table 4. Physical loans and ebook views for titles by discipline for titles with both print and ebook access.</p> <p> <ephtml> <table><thead><tr><td>Discipline</td><td>Physical loans</td><td>Ebook views</td></tr></thead><tbody valign="top"><tr><td>Allied health</td><td char=".">1</td><td char=".">139</td></tr><tr><td>Business</td><td char=".">3</td><td char=".">54</td></tr><tr><td>Communications</td><td char=".">4</td><td char=".">226</td></tr><tr><td>Criminal justice</td><td char=".">3</td><td char=".">21</td></tr><tr><td>Culinary arts</td><td char=".">9</td><td char=".">62</td></tr><tr><td>Education</td><td char=".">7</td><td char=".">30</td></tr><tr><td>English</td><td char=".">22</td><td char=".">67</td></tr><tr><td>History</td><td char=".">7</td><td char=".">176</td></tr><tr><td>Languages</td><td char=".">7</td><td char=".">0</td></tr><tr><td>Math</td><td char=".">0</td><td char=".">52</td></tr><tr><td>Music</td><td char=".">0</td><td char=".">2</td></tr><tr><td>Physical sciences</td><td char=".">6</td><td char=".">22</td></tr><tr><td>Political science</td><td char=".">0</td><td char=".">449</td></tr><tr><td>Psychology</td><td char=".">18</td><td char=".">305</td></tr><tr><td>Recreation and leisure</td><td char=".">2</td><td char=".">3</td></tr><tr><td>Sociology</td><td char=".">11</td><td char=".">5</td></tr></tbody></table> </ephtml> </p> <p>2 <emph>Note:</emph> Textbooks with no online access are not reflected in this table.</p> <p>Though these numbers may give us interesting points of discussion, it is important to remember that circulation statistics and ebook access numbers should not be compared on a one-to-one basis. Instead, these numbers are meant to indicate a baseline to work from as well as an idea of the potential of the project. Some textbooks had just a few more ebook views than loans, while other ebooks dwarfed their physical counterpart in terms of usage. For example, six ebooks had over a hundred online views each, and none of these six books had more than two total physical loans during the course of the 2021–2022 schoolyear.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-7">Discussion and conclusion</hd> <p>The preliminary data lends itself to many further questions and much speculation. What made certain electronic textbooks so popular? Was it because a course had many sections, or perhaps because a single professor took the time to alert their students (or perhaps even post the catalog link to course web sites)? Were the popular ebook licenses for online, hybrid or in-person courses? What we do know from the usage numbers and download statistics is that some etextbook licenses easily justify their expense.</p> <p>And on the other side, there were the ebooks with little-to-no usage. Again, the data on these titles asks more questions than it answers. We have not yet determined if this is because of an inherent preference for print over online titles. Was it a failure of marketing on the library's part? Or perhaps those professors posted their own scans of the textbook to a learning platform such as Blackboard, making the library copy redundant. The problem could also be with the etextbooks themselves, which are essentially a scanned duplicate of the print version. Many professors want the interactive functionality offered <emph>via</emph> textbook access card packages. For example, an accounting professor contacted the library about our electronic copy of their textbook. They wondered why it didn't include the interactive modules available from the access card students could purchase. Without that, they said, their students would not find the resource very useful (and indeed, this title had no views). More research is necessary on electronic textbooks, especially in terms of student and faculty opinions on their usefulness. In this era of access cards and interactive textbooks, are electronic licenses to print textbooks as useful as we would hope? These questions might best be answered through a closer collaboration with disciplinary faculty, as the answers likely vary greatly based on discipline, instructor preference, and class format.</p> <p>This case study, together with those of Noe and Delgado, illustrates many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in our library's multipronged attempts to provide free access to expensive textbooks for our students. The 2021–2022 reserves allocation represented over a third of our overall book budget. As noted earlier, the reserve collection is popular, but also represents a great deal of university money going to publishers who sell costly textbooks. One could look at our reserves initiatives as feeding the textbook industry monster without making any headway toward the open access textbook movement at all. That said, I would argue that until open access (or barring that, affordable) titles are the norm, our students need and deserve to have access to their assigned textbooks in every possible format. This is particularly true for colleges, such as ours, who will be offering online courses for the foreseeable future. Therefore at Kingsborough we have elected to continue purchasing in print and online formats. Our next priorities are to make sure students and faculty are aware of these resources, and to maximize the funds we are provided by further collaborating with faculty to determine exactly which licenses are most needed.</p> <hd id="AN0177456430-8">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0177456430-9"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref33" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Abuloum, A., Farah, A., Kaskaloglu, E., & Yaakub, A. (2019). College students' usage of and preferences for print and electronic textbooks. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (IJET), 14 (07), 80 – 97. https://doi.org/10.3991/ijet.v14i07.9871</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Bailey, M. J., & Dynarski, S. M. (2011). Inequality in postsecondary education. In G. J. Duncan & R. J. 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Undergraduate enrollment by race/ethnicity, gender and college: Percentages, fall 2019. https://<ulink href="http://www.cuny.edu/irdatabook/rpts2%5fAY%5fcurrent/ENRL%5f0033%5fRACE%5fGEN%5fUG%5fPCT.rpt.pdf">www.cuny.edu/irdatabook/rpts2%5fAY%5fcurrent/ENRL%5f0033%5fRACE%5fGEN%5fUG%5fPCT.rpt.pdf</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Currier, C., & Centivany, A. (2021). Controlled digital lending. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58 (1), 80 – 91. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.438</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Delgado, J. (2020). Weeding into outreach: A case study using an urban community college's reserve collection. Urban Library Journal, 26((2), 1 – 18.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Dinkins, D. (2021). The trials and tribulations of providing ebooks: A small university library perspective. Against the Grain, 33 (4), 9 – 11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Georgas, H. (2015). The case of the disappearing ebook: Academic libraries and subscription packages. College & Research Libraries, 76 (7), 883 – 898. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.7.883</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Goldrick-Rab, S., Broton, K. M., & Eisenberg, D. (2015). Hungry to learn: Addressing food and housing insecurity among undergraduates. Wisconsin Hope Lab.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ilieva, R. T., Ahmed, T., & Yan, A. (2019). Hungry minds: Investigating the food insecurity of minority community college students. Journal of Public Affairs, 19 (3), e1891. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1891</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Itzkowitz, M. (2022). Out with the old, in with the new: Rating higher ed by economic mobility. Third Way.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jaeger, D. A., Arellano-Bover, J., Karbownik, K., Martínez-Matute, M., Nunley, J. M., Seals, R. A., Alston, M., Becker, S. O., Beneito, P., Boheim, R., Boscá Mares, J. E., Brown, J., Chang, K.-H., Cobb-Clark, D. 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Journal for Multicultural Education, 14 (3/4), 209 – 218. https://doi.org/10.1108/JME-04-2020-0027</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Julia Furay</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref40"></nolink>
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  Data: 'And We Also Have It Online': Cultivating an Etextbook Collection in a Community College Library
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22New+Review+of+Academic+Librarianship%22"><i>New Review of Academic Librarianship</i></searchLink>. 2024 30(1):92-105.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative
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  Data: This case study details how a community college library, in response to rising textbook costs and COVID-related closures, advocated for and received an increase in funding to provide online copies of many textbooks in its reserve collection. It also provides a glimpse into the roadblocks acquisitions librarians might encounter in trying to bolster online textbook collections, such as licensing issues, expense, and loan periods. The initiative resulted in a major expansion of access to etextbooks, particularly lower undergraduate titles from large textbook publishers. The new etextbooks varied greatly in popularity. Circulation statistics of print textbooks are presented along with usage data for etextbooks for the first year of this initiative. Initial statistics illustrate the potential popularity of etextbooks and also show the need for further investigation about which disciplines are best served by etextbook access, and how best to raise awareness of these titles for professors as well as students.
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        Value: 10.1080/13614533.2024.2328779
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      – Text: English
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        PageCount: 14
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    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Community Colleges
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Academic Libraries
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Textbook Publication
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Electronic Publishing
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      – SubjectFull: Student Costs
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      – SubjectFull: COVID-19
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      – SubjectFull: Pandemics
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      – SubjectFull: School Closing
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      – SubjectFull: Access to Information
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      – SubjectFull: Open Educational Resources
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        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Unit Costs
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Library Role
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Electronic Libraries
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Financial Support
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: New York (New York)
        Type: general
    Titles:
      – TitleFull: 'And We Also Have It Online': Cultivating an Etextbook Collection in a Community College Library
        Type: main
  BibRelationships:
    HasContributorRelationships:
      – PersonEntity:
          Name:
            NameFull: Julia Furay
    IsPartOfRelationships:
      – BibEntity:
          Dates:
            – D: 01
              M: 01
              Type: published
              Y: 2024
          Identifiers:
            – Type: issn-print
              Value: 1361-4533
            – Type: issn-electronic
              Value: 1740-7834
          Numbering:
            – Type: volume
              Value: 30
            – Type: issue
              Value: 1
          Titles:
            – TitleFull: New Review of Academic Librarianship
              Type: main
ResultId 1