Alternatives to Students Purchasing Textbooks
If you're looking for textbook options there are two options.
Licensed course materials are already owned or subscribed to by McKillop Library. These could be textbooks, scholarly books, chapters, articles, or encyclopedia entries. Your librarian can help you download PDFs or find links to these materials to put into your Canvas courseshell.
Open access course materials are freely available online. You can post the PDF of the materials to your Canvas courseshell or provide your students with links to them.
Your librarian is happy to work with you to find licensed or open materials to match your course content. Please see below for some places to look and search strategies if you'd like to look yourself.
Open Access Materials --Freely Available Textbooks
This is by far the simplest access option. If you find an open access textbook that meets your needs in terms of course content and academic quality, students can visit a website to download and print the book without logins or copyright restrictions. The challenge here is that options for high-quality open access textbooks are limited, though growing quickly.
The main sources for open access textbooks are OpenStax and the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Library. Browse or search for subjects. Post links or download and post chapters. I suggest keeping your search broad when searching, for example: "marketing," "finance" or "accounting." These books are free to download in full or in part. Open Textbook Library books often include reviews. You can find other options for open textbooks on the "Open Access Textbooks" tab.
Licensed Materials: E-books, chapters, and subject encyclopedias
The library catalog is a good place to start your search for Salve-licensed e-books from our various e-book vendors. Recognizing that the information below is extensive, please know that your librarian liaison is also available to discuss your needs and search together.
Choosing licensed materials can be more complex than open access materials, but the library has access to much broader subject matter in its licensed electronic collections than may be available on the internet via open access.
The simplest licensed access option is our JSTOR ebook collections, which are all fully accessible and downloadable as PDF chapters. You will do a search for your topic in JSTOR, limit to "book chapters" and limit to an acceptable date range, as JSTOR includes significant historical content (see left).
Our other major e-book vendors, EBSCO and Proquest, also provide significant subject coverage. You can search for these ebooks as well as JSTOR's in the library's catalog.
When searching in the catalog, limit the format to "ebooks" (see below).
When choosing books from these collections, look for answers to two questions:
- Are there limits to the number of simultaneous users?
- Are there limits to how much of the book can be downloaded?
Often EBSCO and Proquest ebooks allow unlimited simultaneous users. However, some offer only 1-3 simultaneous users, which could result in the the book being unavailable if several students try to access it at the same time (ie: the night before reading is due). In addition, if Salve does not have unlimited access to the ebook, one student can choose to download or "check out" the full book which could restrict access to the other students. Finally, while students can read freely online, EBSCO and Proquest have licensing agreements with publishers that limit how many pages can be downloaded if students prefer to print or read offline.
In EBSCO, you can check for access for simultaneous users and downloads after clicking on the book title and opening the ebook (see below).
In Proquest, you can check after clicking on the book title (see below).
