Faculty and Staff Information: Reserves/Course Readings

The library has an ongoing project to make course readings available to our students for as little cost as possible or, preferably, free. 

If we know what titles you are using for course readings, we will make every effort to buy multi-user ecopies of books for students to use.  If these are not available we will buy a paper copy and put it on reserve.  You can email ebook requests directly to Ann Long.  Just let her know that it will be used as a course reading so that she can seek the multi-user license.

If you would like to talk with a librarian about where you might find or link to articles and books that could be used as course readings, we would love to work with you! Just reach out to any of your librarians.

We also recommend exploring Open Educational Resources (OER) as an option.  Learn more about OERs!

Most faculty put links to readings and film clips on their Canvas site.  To stay within copyright guidelines, we recommend that you provide links to articles or chapters of books from within the databases that we license for TU community use.  These are often referred to as perma links or stable links.  If you need instructions on how to do this please see your librarian.

To help make college more affordable for students, we recommend working with the library to make materials available. 

• Check to see if your readings are available in the library resources. Or let the library know what your course readings are so that we can check their availability. We can also work to acquire books in electronic or paper format that you are requiring for courses.
   
• Search library databases for readings that are already licensed by us (free to students & TU community). Academic Search Complete, JSTOR and many other databases with full text articles are available in a single list.
   

• Streaming films and clips are available from databases provided by the library. In some cases, we may be able to license a film from Kanopy if you are teaching it in your class. Talk with us about this before the start of your course. 
  You can search the library catalog for available videos. Conduct your search, then limit to evideo on the left side of the page.

• And of course we have around 300,000 e-books that you can find in the catalog.  Please let us know if you intend to use an ebook for class reading assignments so that we can be sure that we have licensed enough copies.  We license most ebooks for one-at-a-time use due to cost. Just like with physical reserves, it will take us a couple of days to check and then license additional copies. 

If you need to place physical items on reserve, please bring them to the circulation desk and complete a reserve request form.  Remember that we need two full business days to prepare materials for reserve and add them to the database so that they can be checked out.   Dropping an item off at the service desk does not mean that it is immediately available to students.

Have Questions? Contact library@transy.edu.