From Course Reserves . . . to Course Reversed? The Library’s Changing Role in Providing Textbook Content

Academic libraries have always thought of “content” as their domain on campus. Yet beyond the course reserve desk, libraries have traditionally played a relatively small role on campus for the most common form of content in higher education, textbooks. Today, everything about textbooks and other course content is changing quickly. Spiraling costs have made textbooks a political issue in some states, while at the same time traditional textbook publishers experience economic pressures both from the growth of the used and rental markets and from new technological demands from the professors who assign their online books as well as from the students who use them. Librarians have begun to take notice, reversing course on the traditional library view of textbooks. A number of libraries are looking for more affordable ways for students to access textbooks. Many are leveraging open educational resources (OER) as alternatives to expensive, commercially-published textbooks. Other libraries have themselves become textbook publishers. This changed course has led librarians sometimes into new alliances and sometimes into degrees of conflict with other organizations, such as bookstores, commercial publishers, university presses, and aggregators.