Textbooks are just not affordable for everyone, it would be much better to have a reserve system or even a textbook library where books can be borrowed for the quarter and donanted to schools, community colleges and adult education programs when new edition are needed for classes.

I totally agree that more text books should be on reserve, and not just 2 hour reserve, but longer. 24 hour reserve would be great.

Textbooks and calculators should be available for long-term checkout. Textbooks should also be available on reserve. This is not a radical idea. It means less waste and a more accessible education.

If it's possible, this would be awesome.

I don't think we need to be copying large sections of books as that likely breaks copyrights, but it would be nice to go into a special area and just pull the book off the shelf and use it.

Again, agreed!

great idea.

I'm not sure if that would go over okay, with regards to the publishers copyrights of the texts. But, I do believe that it is important to have the library keep copies of the "major" textbooks. I know a few profs who have had to donate their copies and put personal copies on reserve because the library does not have these books. I think it would be a good allocation of funds to purchase these books. Also, if the library has them, and someone wants to reference something from a past course, and has sold the textbook back, they can just go to the library!

This would save teh students tremendously. I'd definately do it. even if i had to pay for paper, it'd be cheaper than a textbook.

while I know that many publishers don't allow universities to put their books on reserve; well then we shouldn't be using those books if need be. College is about an education, not about making publishers rich. For those of us that are less fortunate, course reserves can take a major financial load off.

As nice as it would be for the library to help "fund" our expensive textbooks by holding a larger course reserve section (currently largely supplimented by the professors and staff, not the library) I know that many textbook publishers don't allow their books to be placed on course reserve because of the fear of loosing too many sales. You can always pair up and buy text books together or ask if your professor if he/she will put their book on reserve. Also, the professors have to purchase their own copies of texts as well, so if they don't choose to puchase as extra for course reserve, then we don't get one. This is my understanding.

i agree that there should be more textbooks on reserve, especially if they are expensive. i also think it would be nice to have free scanning that will allow us to save the scanned pages to a computer file so we don't have to be hogging the books all the time and can study the material somewhere else. i ended up buying my physiology book halfway through the quarter because when the midterm came around the book was always being used.

I agree. Affordable education becomes a joke when textbooks cost three hundred bucks a quarter--not even including those kids in the Art Department, where it's an arm and a leg for textbooks *and* materials. What really drives me nuts about our current book reserve system is that you can't tell from an online search whether someone is using a book at any given time. In video reserves, people have to check out the material they're using, even when they're using it in the video room, and that shows up on a search, so you can hang out somewhere else in the library instead of waiting on tenterhooks for somebody to return the video you need--why not for books? And the reserve area is tiny.

Also, audio files for each textbook would be nice. I don't know if this exists for textbooks. And I'm not sure why this isn't pursued by the general populace. If I'm reading a book along with listening to the book-on-tape I can really concentrate and finish my reading in about half the time it would take without the tape. Two senses is better than one.

I agree that there should be an area set aside for textbooks. The scan stations are a wonderful idea, but i think that study guides for course textbooks (for the books that have them) would be very helpful as well.

Especially for the very new textbook (since we love to edition update so much), it makes it difficult to find used textbooks and student who are no a budget can't get the books for cheap.

Every video that's been used in the past two years should be digitized and made available for viewing on the campus network.