Book Lending Program Information for Faculty

Research shows that the cost of textbooks drives students to avoid buying required texts, influences their course selection and even impacts their course load.  Adding adopted textbooks to the Book Lending Program ahead of class helps all your students to have access to assigned readings from day one. It is a concrete step you can take to make your class more equitable, contribute to campus-wide student retention initiatives, and address concerns about the affordability of higher education.

^{Hendricks, Christina, Stefan Reinsberg, and Georg Rieger (2017). The adoption of an open textbook in a large physics course: An analysis of cost, outcomes, usage, and perceptions. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 18(4). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1146231.pdf}

Providing the Book Lending Program with advance notice of your textbook adoptions, providing early copies of course texts to the library's Course Reserves program, and choosing to assign Open Educational Resources are all excellent ways to ensure your students have access to readings at the start of class.

The Book Lending Program collection contains physical textbooks and access codes for digital textbooks. Items in the collection have been requested by University of Redlands students or faculty (all adopted textbooks are not automatically added to the collection) and are purchased with funding from alumni donations. Physical BLP textbooks are located in Armacost Library and are only available for checkout to students who meet the criteria for program participation.

Contact Evelyn Linares, M.Ed: evelyn_linares@redlands.edu and (909) 748-8468
in the Office of Inclusion and Community at x. 8257 or contact Armacost Library.

Contact Evelyn Linares, M.Ed: evelyn_linares@redlands.edu and (909) 748-8468 to start the process of getting a textbook added to the BLP collection. He will work with Armacost Library staff to make the book available for checkout by participating students.

Please allow at least two weeks for newly requested books to be added to the BLP collection. Newly purchased physical textbooks need to be shipped to campus, cataloged, and physically processed before they can be checked out.

Only students participating in the Book Lending Program can view Book Lending Program textbooks. Students must verify their eligibility to participate in the program before they can access books. Eligibility to participate is based on several factors, including estimated family contribution and first-generation status. Once verified, students access Book Lending Program textbooks by placing a request for the book in Armacost Library's catalog and picking up the textbook from the front desk.

Course reserves are physical books or electronic articles/chapters that instructors have asked the library to place on reserve. All library users can see items placed on course reserve. University of Redlands students and employees can download PDFs of electronic reserve readings and check out physical reserve books for short checkout periods. Physical reserves are available from Armacost Library's front desk

When choosing a digital textbook, it's important to examine license terms carefully. Major textbook publishers can introduce contract language that limits your and your students' access to readings, in some cases canceling out the provisions of educational fair use. Here are some things to check for:

• Are you allowed to download content from the textbook and add it to a learning management system? (Your students may wish to download parts of a textbook ahead of time if they have slow connections at home or want to refer to the reading later)
• Can students refer to the text after the end of class, or is access restricted beyond the end of the current term?
• Does the textbook follow web accessibility standards? Can files be converted to other formats to enable access through multiple modalities (for example, to plain text for use with a screen reader)?
• Does the publisher describe what data they will collect from students and how they use that data?
• Does the publisher prevent libraries from making the textbook available and affordable through course reserves?

CDI, UCIC, the Hunsaker Teaching Center, and Armacost Library developed a short list of best practices available here. You can also find more information about Open Educational Resources through Armacost Library and ITS Instructional Technology.