Proposal

Narrative

The FAU Libraries are requesting $75,000 to purchase e-books for students to use for their coursework. As stated in the Provost’s Memorandum on textbook affordability (August 2, 2017), FAU is committed to minimizing the costs of required or recommended textbooks and instructional materials to students while still maintaining a high quality of education and intellectual integrity. Faculty are encouraged to seek out Open Education Resources (OER) and open-access textbooks when feasible, and in instances when non-open access books are selected, faculty should weigh the costs and benefits to the students. The Libraries can play an important role in textbook affordability by purchasing electronic texts that faculty can adopt for their courses. Students, in turn, would be able to access the texts at no additional cost. The $75,000 will be placed into a deposit account with a book vendor such as EBSCO. The vendor will then provide the Libraries with seamless access to thousands of scholarly and academic e-books in any number of subject areas from various publishers. E-books are purchased only if a user views an e-book for a specified number of minutes, views pages in the book, or print pages from the book. These are called, “purchase triggers.” The payment for each triggered book will be deducted from the $75,000 deposit account. This seamless process of purchasing triggered books from a pool or large collection is commonly referred to as a patron-driven acquisition (PDA) or demand-driven acquisition (DDA) plan in the academic library world because the patrons (FAU students and faculty) are selecting or triggering the books that the library will purchase. Textbook companies do not sell traditional textbooks to libraries because the companies know that it will not be economically advantageous for them to sell one copy of a book to a library that many students could access for free. This means the publisher would lose out on selling its textbook to hundreds of students. Making scholarly and academic e-books available through the Libraries will allow faculty to consider adopting any one of the books that are available in the PDA pool for their courses. Students can also use these books for future research and course assignments. Again, access will be perpetual and unlimited. Target Student Population These e-book collections will benefit students in all disciplines and colleges. Faculty will be able to access any of the books and review the content before adopting it as a course text.

Facilities

none

Hardware Requirements

none

Software Requirements

none

Personnel Costs

none

Other Costs

1. e-book collection PDA Plan @ $75,000.00 TOTAL = $75,000.00

Timeline

We anticipate providing access to the e-books as soon as funds are available.

Sustainability

The requested amount will cover the costs to purchase and license e-books for perpetual, unlimited user access. Once the deposit account is depleted, the Libraries will review usage and content statistics to determine if it will pay additional funds to the vendor to continue the PDA plan.

Resource Matching

none

Implementing Organization

FAU Libraries Collection Management Department