The Lemieux Library is committed to increasing students’ access to information and reducing the high costs of their education. Faculty can help ease the burden of textbook costs many students face by selecting course materials which are available through the Library’s collections or subscriptions, or by selecting open access materials.

• Use Lemieux Library Subscribed Electronic Resources

Choose eBook titles from our collections; many allow for multiple simultaneous users so that a whole class can have unlimited access. The Library works to acquire electronic versions of course books with unlimited users. Work with your Liaison Librarian to request an eBook.

• Use Course Reserves

Place physical copies of required or recommended texts on course reserve in the library. The library will investigate purchase or license of electronic versions of requested materials to fulfill such requests. When purchasing or licensing electronic materials is not feasible, the library may create scans for electronic reserve and deliver them to instructors for upload to Canvas. Scanning will be limited by applicable copyright laws.

• Link to Articles

Link to articles available through the Library’s subscriptions. Find articles by author or title,browse our journal subscriptions, browse our list of databases, or contact your Liaison Librarian for assistance.

• Innovate

Replace a traditional textbook with articles, book excerpts, audio, or video that are licensed through the Lemieux Library, open access, or freely available online.

Prompt book adoptions allow the Campus Store to get better deals with wholesalers and give students more time to search for more affordable options.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are instructional materials that are freely available but that can also be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed due to the author’s/creator’s pre-selection of a creative commons license. This license allows other interested parties to use the resource as they wish, but places stipulations on those permissions like attribution, share alike, and non-commercial. An open source (or open) textbook is a textbook which is OER.

You will soon discover that there are myriad open educational resources that exist. Often the trouble lies in locating those that fit precisely what you need. You can find tips below, or check out Seattle University’s Open Education Task Force for other resources to help with open education.

Seattle University’s Center for Digital Learning and Innovation (CDLI) maintains a list of places to find Open Educational Resources ranging from textbooks with ancillary materials, activities, images, and other materials.

Here are some other great places to start:

Open Textbook Library

A comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks from the University of Minnesota and supported by the Open Education Network. All textbooks are free, and the majority are peer reviewed. Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted, downloaded, edited and distributed. Now offering 1,164 open textbooks, the Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network, an active community of higher education leaders that works together to build sustainable open education programs.

OpenStax College

Widely adopted postsecondary education open textbook repository. Review the textbook online, and if you decide to use it in your class,let OpenStax know. To access faculty-only materials, you can create an OpenStax account and request faculty access. Once we manually verify that you’re an instructor, you will have access to all faculty content. Include the textbook URL in your course materials, and from there, students can choose how they want to view the book.

Google Books

Provides online access to full-text books in the public domain. Google Search makes it easy to search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

Project Gutenberg

Find more than 34,000 full-text eBooks in the public domain. In other words, no individual owns these works; rather, they are owned by the public. What does that mean exactly? Simply, anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission and without citing the original author, but no one can ever own it.

Both the library and CDLI are able to help you begin your search for open educational resources. You can contact your Liaison Librarian or make an individual consultation appointment with the Center for Digital Learning and Innovation.