Addressing Textbook Affordability with Institutional Licensed E-textbooks

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a textbook affordability project implemented during 2020-2021 at East Tennessee State University (four-year public doctoral institution with over 14,500 students). The project involved an acquisitions librarian, electronic resources librarian, and digital scholarship librarian who worked together to identify and acquire institutionally licensed textbooks utilizing campus bookstore data. The library created customized textbook permalinks for instructors to insert into their course Learning Management System (LMS) for tracking and support purposes. In addition, the library provided a searchable list of course textbooks on their website using the Springshare E-Reserves module. Near the end of each semester, surveys were sent to students and instructors to assess their satisfaction with the service and impressions of using e-textbooks. The overview includes our project workflow, including implementation, faculty communication, acquisition, discovery, and ongoing support. We will also highlight issues encountered and offer best practices for ongoing support and management of the program. In addition, we will provide summaries of the student and instructor surveys