Top Textbooks in Review: Considering a Decade’s Worth of a Textbook Affordability Program By Jennifer E. M. Cotton (University of Maryland, College Park Libraries) <jecotton@umd.edu> https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1018-431X
Introduction The Top Textbooks on Reserve program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) Libraries began almost a decade ago as a way for the UMD Libraries to provide immediate and direct assistance to students struggling with the high costs of their required course materials. Though the Top Textbooks program has faced a number of challenges in meeting this goal over that time, it continues to help students and is expanding at the present time. This article is intended to provide a review of the Top Textbooks program over the past ten years, and in particular to share some of the insights that have emerged from running it so that other libraries can benefit from the lessons learned.
Origins and Early Years The University of Maryland, College Park serves over 40,700 students in 12 different schools and colleges, with 104 undergrad majors, 115 master’s programs, and 84 doctoral programs.1 The University of Maryland Libraries consists of eight branches, each of which manages its own hardcopy reserves, with centralized electronic and streaming media reserves services located in the main McKeldin Library, along with the Top Textbooks on Reserves “By focusing program. All of the reserves services on outreach, operated out of the McKeldin Library part of the Resource Sharing and collaboration, are Reserves (RSR) unit in the User adaptation, and Services and Resource Sharing department. assessment, the
Top Textbooks on Reserve program has been helping students learn for almost a decade, and to date has provided UMD students a maximum potential savings of over $1.5 million.”
Since the origins and early years of the Top Textbooks program (along with workflows and criteria for title selection) have already been described at more length in a previous article,2 this discussion will focus primarily on the program during and following the Covid-19 pandemic, and efforts to rebuild and expand the Top Textbooks in its wake. In brief, the Top Textbooks program originated in early 2014, out of conversations among members of the Student Government Association (SGA) and staff and upper administration of the UMD Libraries about the issues surrounding textbook affordability, and what the Libraries could do to help students. Though the specifics have shifted some over the years, the fundamental idea of the Top Textbooks program remains that the Libraries identify some of the largest (highest enrollment) courses on campus
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for which we can provide the required textbooks, and offer those textbooks for four-hour loans. While eBooks are included in the program when they are available to the Libraries with unlimited simultaneous user licenses, those remain rare, and the bulk of the program lies in physical books. The program began offering the textbooks for 50 courses at a single library branch during the Fall 2014 semester, expanding to approximately 100 courses starting in Fall 2015.
The Pandemic and Aftermath In between the Fall 2014 and Fall 2023 semesters lies Spring 2020, and with it the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this time, the UMD campus as a whole moved first to an entirelyremote model of operations, with no one entering the Libraries at all, followed by a primarily-remote model for the 2020-2021 academic year. In the initial version of the second model, a limited number of the Libraries staff were permitted into the Libraries, but book check-out was only done via curbside pickup and all materials were quarantined between users. Even once all Libraries employees and other members of the UMD community began to be permitted back inside the library, they were only allowed inside in limited numbers for restricted amounts of time up until the Fall 2021 semester. Because the Top Textbooks program deals primarily in physical books, the program was largely suspended for the duration of the remote period. No new books were added during this time, and the existing collection was only available for chapter scanning requests. However, we did identify the instructors for the courses that might have been considered for inclusion under normal circumstances, and let them know that while the program was not currently operating, we did still have a large textbook collection, and would be glad to provide scans of portions of these works through our electronic reserves service. As seen in Graph 1, the Covid-19 pandemic dealt a huge blow to the usage of this popular program. In addition to all of the other disruptions associated with the pandemic, we saw a large loss of institutional knowledge among the student body. We have always notified the instructors whose courses are included in the Top Textbooks that their books are available for students to check out, but we also know from anecdotal student reports that the transmission of this information to the students themselves is inconsistent at best. In addition to not coming into the libraries, the opportunities for direct word-ofmouth information sharing between the students were severely diminished in an entirely virtual class environment. Many of the students who were familiar with the Top Textbooks graduated or left, and incoming students didn’t know about the program and had few ways to learn. When the Top Textbooks returned with the return to campus in Fall 2021, we saw an 84% decrease in usage from the pre-
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