Abstract
When the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley University Library started purchasing etextbooks for required courses in 2018, we were one of the few in the UT System who had an explicit program. Now, it’s becoming a more common practice for libraries to put funds usually reserved for course reserves or other faculty requests into ebooks. As COVID began to shut down our physical operations we began to receive a large influx of etextbook requests from faculty. Luckily, the library had a student savings tracking process in place for required etextbook purchases, and a fund designated for these purchases. The strong relationship between Collection Development and Scholarly Communications prior to the influx of new requests made adapting to this influx relatively orderly.
Highlights
When the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley University Library started purchasing etextbooks for required courses in 2018, we were one of the few in the UT System who had an explicit program
unlimited concurrent user licenses (UCUL) are ebook licenses that allow an unlimited number of users to access an ebook at once, which is necessary for replacing a required textbook in a course that may have dozens of students trying to access the text at any one time
If it hadn’t been for the previous understanding about what kinds of licenses were needed for required textbooks, who was monitoring student savings made by UCUL purchases, and what funding code was to be used, this transition might have been much more chaotic
Summary
The library ended all physical material loaning in Spring 2020 and moved most staff to remote work. Once we shut down after COVID-19 in Spring, and faculty realized their summer courses were going to be online, we greatly ramped up the program, which required several fundamental changes in the way we had been acquiring materials and how library departments were working together. If it hadn’t been for the previous understanding about what kinds of licenses were needed for required textbooks, who was monitoring student savings made by UCUL purchases, and what funding code was to be used, this transition might have been much more chaotic. We halted almost all physical book purchases and greatly expanded the textbook affordability (TXBAF) fund, and developed a new collection development policy section focused on etextbooks
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