Textbooks & Reserves: Place an Item on Reserve

Course Reserves/Textbooks

If you need additional print materials for your course whether they are library owned or your personal copies they can be made available for you students to check out. We offer 2-hour, 1-day, 3-day, or 7-day checkout of these materials. Place new course reserves requests using our online form, or come to the circulation desk to fill out a request form in person.

Course reserve materials will be kept on reserve for one calendar year.  If you decide to remove materials from course reserves, please email lib-cir@okstate.edu indicating which items may be returned to you or to our collections.

Additionally, we also encourage assigning course materials that are available to students online. Some helpful strategies to support these efforts include:

• Assign content available from the Library’s existing digital resources. Our 54 databases, 130,000 e-serials, 3.2M e-books and other electronic resources, including the Library's 65 digital collections, are accessible via the Library's website. An easy option is to link to the item from the OSU Library Search. Search for the resource, click on it in the results, and then click the Permalink button on the right side. By sharing that link, students will be prompted to login with their OKEY credentials to gain access to the resource. Your subject specialist can help with this process.

• Consider adopting an Open Educational Resource (OER). These freely available educational materials are openly licensed to allow for re-use and modification by instructors. There are no restrictions on the number of students accessing OERs.

• Explore opportunities to provide access to course material via Canvas using the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law.

• Request that the Library purchase an electronic copy of required course readings. Please note that we cannot guarantee purchase of all requests. Many textbook publishers do not provide electronic purchasing options for libraries. Approximately 85% of existing course textbooks are simply unavailable to libraries in any format other than print. Textbook publishers have built their profit models around selling e-textbooks directly to students.

Efforts will be made to secure online materials that are free from digital rights management restrictions (DRM) in order to ensure unfettered student access. DRM includes limits on the number of users that can access a resource at any one time, as well as limits on copying, printing and downloading.

Additionally, if you assign e-books from the library as required course readings, please be aware that our licenses for some e-books limit the number of people who may use them at one time. The records for most e-books indicate how many simultaneous users are permitted. If you have any questions about the license for a specific book, please contact us, especially if you intend to assign the book to a large number of students who are likely to need it at the same time.

• Contact your subject specialist for assistance with finding existing digital resources for your class.