Posted on behalf of Matt Wolverton, Head of Collections and Technical Services.
With the increase in demand for accessible course readings, the library is stepping up to help faculty ensure access for their students through webinars about making texts accessible and attempting to license ebook versions of textbooks.
Over the summer we held three sessions of Ensuring Course Readings Are Accessible to Students, a webinar that covered creating stable descriptive links to library content, using YuJa Panorama and Adobe Acrobat to ensure that PDFs are accessible, and creating documents with accessibility in mind. We recorded the sessions and will be holding more live sessions in the Fall semester.
Additionally, the library has the ability to order certain ebooks through licenses with various vendors and publishers. We set aside dollars on an annual basis devoted to the purchase of faculty requests of individual books. We primarily purchase to support research and curriculum, however, we are able to purchase ebook textbooks if a license is available to us. Oftentimes, publishers do not allow libraries and institutions to purchase ebooks that they deem as textbooks (see our colleagues at GVSU’s explanation). However, we can still try.
Contact me, Matt Wolverton mwolvert@umich.edu, and I can tell you whether or not an ebook license is available to us for requested items and potentially purchase them. Faculty can link to our ebooks (as well as journal articles, streaming media, etc.) and thus provide students with a legitimate copy that they are able to use. To ensure a speedy process, it’s helpful to provide the title, author, ISBN, and edition in your request.
Again, many publishers do not make textbooks available to libraries and institutions, and if they do they are sometimes older editions. We also try to get unlimited use licenses, but those are not always available. However, we are dedicated to supporting our students’ learning and scholarship through our collections.
University of Michigan-Flint
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