Starting Spring term, the Hannon Library’s text-share program will buy books costing $75 or more in the SOU bookstore.
The Hannon Library provides SOU students with accessible text-share and course reserve textbooks. For students, these textbooks are available for free in the Hannon Library for 2 or 4 hour loan periods, and provide students with access to the books required for their courses each term.
The library purchases these books from the SOU bookstore. Historically, the purchasing threshold has been $100. Beginning in Fall Term, student Genesis Beas, a Hannon Library PEAK student employee, initiated a project to lower this purchasing threshold to $75. Genesis worked with the librarians of the Access Services department of the library, ASSOU and the bookstore to lower the purchasing threshold for Spring Term.
Kate Jones is the resource sharing and fulfillment services lead in the Access Services department of the Hannon Library. In order to provide students with access to resources they need, Jones coordinates inter-library loans and consortial borrowing with other libraries. Part of her responsibilities are to fulfill local circulation needs, including managing course reserves and text-share.
“We have a lot of items that are available for students to use…textbooks or books that their instructors have identified that they want them to have access to,” Jones said.
Course reserves include locally owned books and books that instructors have given the library to put on reserve, but the majority of the items available are called text-share. “This is a program that is generously sponsored by ASSOU and it is in coordination with the SOU bookstore,”
Jones said.
Genesis Beas has been working at the library as a lead student, and was recently hired in a PEAK – Professional Engagement, Achievement, and Knowledge – position as the text-share liaison student.
Beas said that “[This involved] focusing a lot on the text-share program and how to improve it based on what the circulation department wants to see.”
“As we were developing this project, we were realizing this doesn’t work without contacting ASSOU and contacting the bookstore,” she said– which prompted Beas and the circulation department to reach out. “Now textbooks are costing $200, $300. While the $100 threshold was fine, we were seeing a lot of books barely missing that threshold.”
In order to better serve the students, Beas and the circulation department proposed a $75 threshold to Danny Hernandez, ASSOU vice-president, which was approved. “We just really wanted to be more inclusive of the books that are just under $100 but can still be a very expensive cost to students,” she explained.
Now that the library has an additional 23 textbooks, Beas and Jones both expressed the relevance of this change to students.
“The text-share program is a resource that students don’t really know about,” Jones said. “For the students it means that more of their textbooks are course reserves, so they can come into the library, check them out, use them, and they don’t need to purchase the books.”
“It’s really helpful if you don’t want to carry around books with you and if you really don’t have the budget to buy textbooks,” Beas agreed.
To learn more about the text-share program at the library, there will be a SOAR presentation on May 16, with a time to be determined. This presentation will involve an open discussion with students about text-share.
