Open and Affordable Textbook Initiative @ the Library

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers for students, and which also carry legal permissions for open use. OER can: 

• Increase equity - provides access for all students to the learning materials they need on day one (and also in the future)
• Offer faculty creativity and flexibility in course design (faculty have the ability to customize relevant and high quality content to align with unique teaching and learning outcomes)
• Create opportunities to engage students with content creation
• Support local and global access to teaching and learning as a social justice issue
• Reduce the cost of an LMU education for our students

Yes, please! Regardless of how or where textbooks are ultimately accessed or purchased, it’s important to submit your required textbook adoptions to the bookstore. Barnes & Noble Education allows faculty to submit Open Educational Resources (OER) and library e-books, and can include information on the bookstore website for students to access.

Not all of our e-books in Primo have unlimited user licenses. If a professor assigns a text and a link to the library record for an e-book with a single-user license, this can result in frustration for students who cannot access the book if the maximum number of other patrons are simultaneously using it. But everything you find via Faculty Select should be suitable for adoption. If you are not finding what you are looking for, please consult with a librarian!

The Hannon Library can only purchase what the publishers make available with institutional licensing. (This may not include titles that are available via Kindle.) For more details, please read the Open Letter to LMU Faculty about Textbooks and Library Collections, shared in Fall 2020.

Ideally, every e-book that the library has would allow for unrestricted downloading, sharing, printing, and reading. But we are limited by the licenses that the publishers make available. Some are more permissive than others, and it varies by title. Here’s a good help guide with information about printing and downloading from e-books.