Adding printed open textbooks to the library provides examples for instructors considering adoption and access to students who need or want a physical book.

Like at UVic, the Langara College library and bookstore have a strong partnership with the goal of providing “students and instructors with a centralized place to gather course materials, whether print or digital, commercial or openly licensed.” Instructors who use OER in the classroom are asked to inform the Langara Bookstore so these items can be added to the course materials list.^[1]

Besides including open textbooks and other OER in its bookstore, Langara College is one of several post-secondary institutions in British Columbia that stocks open textbooks on its library shelves as course references. Still, not everyone agrees that college and university libraries should include printed open textbooks. The below list of considerations is a good place for libraries to begin the discussion about where they stand on this matter.

Respondents to the BCcampus Print-on-Demand Survey were split on whether or not printed copies of open textbooks should be part of a post-secondary library’s collection. This is what they said.

Library templates

Here are templates to plan and direct the library’s participation in an open textbook printing service:

• Printed open textbook decision form [Word file]
• Open textbook tracking form [Word file]
• Open textbook options for adoption [Word file]

Libraries in action

Opinions aside, several colleges and universities are choosing to include printed OER in their library stacks. In addition to Langara College, other examples are listed below.

Douglas College

Debra Flewelling, Open Education & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Douglas College, says that, in the past, her department would buy bound copies of select open textbooks so faculty could assess them as they considered adopting an open educational resource. If an instructor chose to use an open textbook, a printed copy was placed in the library’s course reserve.

“What’s changing our practice these days,” adds Flewelling, “is that some of our faculty have moved beyond adoption to adaptation. We’re now experimenting with printing and Cerlox-binding textbooks in our printshop in order to include open textbooks in our course reserves.”

University of British Columbia (UBC)

The UBC Library houses several Open Collections, including UBC publications and theses and dissertations by its students. cIRcle, UBC’s open access digital repository, contains published and unpublished materials authored by UBC staff, faculty, students, and its partners and the surrounding community.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU)

At KPU, the library does not automatically put required open textbooks on reserve. Instead, it allows each faculty member to decide whether their adopted textbooks should be placed there.

“We also leave it up to the student whether they would like to use the online or print copy of a required open textbook,” says Caroline Daniels, Librarian at KPU. “We have made print-on-demand (PoD) services available in a number of ways in hopes of accommodating all the different scenarios that may arise. While faculty can make arrangements in advance with the KPU bookstore to make printed books available to students within their courses, the library can also help students obtain print copies of open textbooks for any of their courses for the price of printing.”

This is done, explains Daniels, either through KPU’s print services or, for books in the B.C. Open Collection, through SFU Document Solutions (see Appendix B). KPU has made a special arrangement with SFU whereby print-on-demand open textbooks are delivered at no charge to a KPU campus through B.C.’s post-secondary interlibrary loan service.

“In the end,” says Daniels, “we try to think of what suits the student best.”