 Perfect. So we are at our last session of the day for Big Talk from Small Libraries 2020. I am Krista Porter, your host here from the Nebraska Library Commission. Big Talk from Small Libraries is sponsored by the Association for Rural and Small Libraries and the Nebraska Library Commission. Our annual conference, where all of our presenters are from organizations, public libraries, academic libraries, whatever kind of libraries that have the small FTEs or populations served. We try of generally 10,000 or less, but definitely on our smaller side here. And with us right now is Erin Merrill. Good afternoon, Merrill. Erin, and she is from Westminster College in Utah. Perfect, thank you. Correct, section of integration, yeah. From, yeah, Salt Lake City, Utah. And their FTE is 2,500, correct? Correct. Pop that, yeah. Sorry? We're actually a bit under, but I'll talk about that in just a second. Oh, okay, great. All right, so I will, and she's gonna talk about the textbook donation program, which I think is, any academics is very dear to our heart that there's something in need. So I'll just hand it over to you, Erin, to tell us all about what you did there. Perfect, thank you so much. I first wanna give a big thank you to everyone that stuck around for the last session of the day. It's nice to know that I'm not speaking out to avoid, but I'm happy to be here with everyone today. I will be talking about, like she said, how to create a textbook donation program to build a course reserve. So just to get things started, I can't progress my slide. You should be able to, if you clicked on it, it should likely, there it goes. So just to give you an overview of the presentations so you know what you can expect throughout my session is I'll start by talking about the potential impact of course reserve, then the creation and workflow of a textbook donation program, how to assess the program once you get it going, buries and benefits of the program, and finally, I'll leave the time for questions. But I wanna give you a better idea of our college campus so you know really what we're working with here. This semester we're a little bit lower than usual, but we have 2,215 students here at Westminster. They're pretty smart with an average 3.57 incoming student GPA. Just about half of the students come from out of state or international, and most importantly, we don't have a single classroom with more than 40 students, which we're really just trying to be a small tight-knit community, which is pretty common with liberal arts colleges. To give you a better idea about our library, we only have seven full-time staff. We're quite small. Five of us are librarians, and then we also have two professional support staff. And believe it or not, we're only down to four librarians right now, and we are in the middle of a search for a new head of collections and access. So we're a small team, but we're strong. We also have 17 student employees who help us on the evenings and weekends, and really, all the time always. We're grateful to have their help as well. We're open 93.5 hours a week. We have over 97 databases, 86,000 books, plus nearly a quarter million e-books. And last year, we circulated just over 5,000 items in the academic year. So that includes books, movies, course reserves, anything that students can check out from our collections. I wanna give you an idea of kind of what we're dealing with so you can understand the rest of my presentation in context. But if you're looking to create a textbook donation program, you're trying to figure out where to start. Well, in my opinion, the very first place you should go is examining your student needs. So you have a better idea of how students are actually spending money on textbooks on your campus. So to do this, you'll want to work with your bookstore to obtain a list of required course material for each course. For me, all that means is emailing the bookstore representative and asking if she'll send me the list. Depending on when I ask in the semester, she may not have it yet. As you can imagine, faculty sometimes drag their feet and getting materials in. But as soon as she has the complete list, she always is willing to share that with me and it comes in a PDF. Next, you'll want to record each material's lowest available price, highest available price, and overall average price. The reason why you wanna be collecting multiple prices is so you can get an actual understanding of how students might have to spend money on course materials. You'll also want to track the average number of materials per course. As you can imagine, there's a difference between having four books required and one book required and the four books will be much more expensive. And then finally, you wanna track prices over multiple semesters to determine trends on your campus. One semester is really not enough to have a good idea of what spending for students is like and so you'll wanna do it over time. So what exactly should you be tracking when you are looking at this information? There's several different things. You'll always wanna take note of both the course name and the professor name. This helps you understand which disciplines are more expensive for one, but it also helps you later down the road when you're adding books to course reserve. You don't have to scramble to find out where that book is required and who the professor is. I also record the author, book title, and edition and year of the book. The reason being is that on occasion, you'll find books that have the same title but are actually have very different content. So we wanna make sure that we are giving students exactly what they need. And so recording the author and the edition can make sure that they're dealing with the same, the appropriate material. The other reason why you want edition and year, I know you are all familiar with having to buy a textbook, different editions have different things as you wanna make sure that you have the appropriate year. Next, you wanna track the highest cost. And so if there are five prices listed, you simply just track the very most expensive one. You'll do the same with the lowest cost. So the lowest price is what you record and then the average cost. Now the average cost is not the average between the highest cost and the lowest cost, rather it's the average of every price listed. So if there were five books listed, five prices listed for one book, you will add all five prices and then divide it by five to get the average. It wasn't realistic for me to record every single price for every book. Sometimes there could be even 12 prices listed due to being rented or a used edition or an online edition, there's a lot of different ways that a book might be, one book might be available to students. So for me, the best thing I could do is just get the overall average. One thing to note though is not every book will have different prices for the average low and high cost. For example, this textbook here only was only available in one format. And so only had one price, which means the high, low and average cost was 246.5 in every column. And so even when there's only one price listed, you'll put that price in every column, which will give you a better idea of spending later on. So what does this actually mean at a campus level? Well, here's a crazy graph of what it means at our campus here. I have been tracking for the 2018, 2019 academic year, as well as this current academic year, which is fall 2019, spring 2020. And I want to highlight a few things that I discovered in tracking all of this. First of all, when you're looking at the fall semesters, so from fall 2018 to fall 2019, the average cost went up $11. And I want to highlight to you that this is really just the best case scenario. This is when I'm looking at the low average cost. So this is assuming that students were able to get the absolute lowest price the bookstore listed the book at. And in this scenario, even between fall 2018 and fall 2019, the price went up $11. For spring, from spring 19 to spring 20, we did see an increase. It wasn't as drastic. It was about $3. But in addition to the overall average cost increasing, we also saw an increase in the number of books that were required per course. So it went up about 0.5 from fall 2018 to fall 2019. And as you can imagine, the more books you need to buy, the higher your expenses become. And that's went up about 0.5 between spring 19 and spring 20 as well. When I'm looking at it at a semester level, what I did was I calculated the low average cost of the book times the number of books per course. So this column by this column. And then I assumed that all students are in four courses, which according to our registrar is about the average. So then I multiplied that by four and it gave us the average cost for the semester. From fall 2018 to fall 2019, it went up nearly $150, which is a significant increase in a short amount of time. The increase again for spring 19 to spring 20 wasn't as drastic, but it still did go up about $120. So when you look at the full academic year over in this column here, we saw a total of a $268 increase from the 2018-2019 academic year to the 2019-2020 year. Wow, that's cool. Pretty significant and then that's just one year. Yeah. So that means that students could be spending best case scenario on average $792. That could be rent, that can be gas for their car, that can be a plane ticket home over the holidays. It can go to so many other things. And I wanna remind you that this is the best case scenario. So what about the other students, the textbook broker students? These are the students who were only able to buy books at the average cost. They maybe weren't as quick to get the bookstore, the cheapest ones were gone. What about these students? You'll notice that in these columns, the increases are pretty similar. I just want you to note that we were in the 50s in the best case scenario and now we're about in the 70s. But even here, we saw an increase about $259 per academic year. But so now our current students on average really should be expecting to spend about $1,000 an academic year purely on textbooks, which is significant from last year. And now let's think about our absolutely saddest students, the textbook broker students. We jump up all the way to the 90s for the average cost per book here. The increase overall in the academic year is pretty similar at $262. But these students are our worst case scenario. These are the students that could not find the book at any other price. They had to buy it at the absolutely highest price on average. These students can expect to pay around $1350. That's pretty significant. So what does this actually mean overall? Let's kind of look at the overview of yearly increases. You can see the low average, the overall average and the high average increase from last year to this year. It's about $250 in every column, but last year's worst case scenario is actually this year's kind of average scenario. And it's pretty scary to see if this, I'm curious to see if this trend will continue and I'm scared to see that it might. It is also important to note that this is an overall campus average and the actual numbers will vary by student and major. For example, a lot of the students in our humanities won't even hit this 524 mark. They have cheaper books, less books that they might need to buy and they might not actually hit that average. Whereas some of our students in the nursing program, however, might actually be doubling this. We do also track it by course and major, but for the purpose of today's presentation, I just wanted to give you an overall picture of our campus spending care. So to give you some idea of the actual cost for our current year, I went through all of the listed books and wanted to see how many actually were listed at certain prices. And we had 11 books that were listed over 350, 30 over in the 300 to 3049 action, 54 in the 250 to 299, 73 in the 200 to 249 range, 95 in the 150 and to 199 range and 150 in the 100 to 149 range. So ultimately what that means is that 33% of books at Westminster actually cost more than $100. That means that students have a one in three chance of having to buy a textbook that costs more than 100, which if you remember the previous graphs is actually higher than every single average in the low overall average and high average cost per book. In reality, students about have a one in three chance of having to purchase that. So how do students actually cope with these costs? They might buy a purchase an older edition of the textbook that sometimes can throw them off in the semester when they don't have the same page numbers, they're missing certain content. They might delay purchasing the textbook if a student can't afford to pay their tuition and their room and board up front at the start of the semester, they might delay purchasing the textbook by the time they have a new paycheck come in or they actually can afford to buy it. They might already be behind and falling behind in their course. Some students just simply never purchase the textbook. You can imagine how that might affect their grades and some share the textbook with other students. This is actually pretty similar to what might happen with course reserve or they illegally download the textbook from the internet. Obviously we're hoping that students don't choose that option, but we know that's a reality for many. We even see some even more sad things when students have to result to ulterior ways to get the use out of their textbooks. So for some students, when they're crying about how much money they've spent for their textbooks, they might use it as a tissue to get the most out of it. Others, when they can't afford to get a gym pass, we'll use them to lift weights and build up their strength. For some, when their heating gets turned off from all of the money they spent on their textbooks, they'll have to result to burning it or warmth. And others, when they can't afford an umbrella, we'll use it for shelter in the rain. Obviously I'm just joking, but students feel like their textbooks are so much and they better use everything they can out of it. But we want to avoid students doing this and rather we want to teach them how to avoid buying the expensive textbook altogether. And this is where the textbook donation program really comes into play. So to give you a little bit of background, when I was first hired at Westminster, I was hired to promote open educational resources or OER. That's not something that they had on campus before and so they hired me to get the ball rolling. I was also pretty new to the idea of OER, so I spent my time getting more familiar with it, doing my research, getting better educated. And what I discovered is that a lot of schools have a stipend program. So what I did is I created an OER initiative proposal that I proposed to our provost that ultimately was asking for funding to give stipends to a certain number of faculty who would adopt or adapt textbooks, open educational textbooks into their classes to save money for our students. The provost was super supportive, she loved the idea. However, there was no funding. We weren't able to provide those stipends for our faculty, at least not at this time, perhaps later in the future, there was ultimately no funding to encourage this. However, we felt like it was still important, we saw the need, and so we tried to promote it and offer support for faculty to do that without the stipend. And in doing so, we ran into a couple problems. First of all, our faculty have some really unique courses here at Westminster. It's something that we love about Westminster. We have classes that are really tailored to our student population, their interests, their career goals, but because a lot of our courses are so unique, it's really hard for our professors to find an open educational resource that directly fits their class. Similarly, the faculty have a lot of resistance in taking the time it might need to adapt to the textbook to fit their needs, or to even find a textbook that would work, but would take time to rework their syllabus, create new assignments, and so on and so forth. So ultimately, no funding means no interest from our faculty, and so OER kind of hit a stalemate here on our campus. However, as we saw in the previous slides, there was persistent student need. In fact, the student need is increasing. And so ultimately, we got to the point of wanting to create a textbook donation program. So we first learned about this in a listserv. I know we are a listserv and I pitched it to my boss and she decided it was worth a shot. And so let me walk you through how we got here. So first of all, if you're gonna do a textbook donation program, you wanna have a checklist of things to do. You'll wanna create a donation workflow and determine a donation period. So when students can actually come and donate their textbooks. For us, that was the first day of finals to two weeks after finals ends. If we opened up that period any sooner than finals, we weren't gonna get any donations because students still need them for their finals. And we left it up two weeks after finals because students have just spent an entire semester stressing out and it sometimes takes them two weeks to remember that this program exists, should be stressed and have the desire to come and donate. The other thing is we first started this after spring semester, which is right when a lot of people start moving home for the summer. And a lot of students actually were coming and dropping off their textbooks. So they didn't have to pack them up and fly them home or drive them home or anything like that. And we found that it was about two weeks after finals that we continued to get donations. You'll also wanna determine who will monitor the donations to make sure that they're coming in, that students aren't running off with someone else's donated textbook, to just really watch the process. In that case, this was me. You'll also wanna determine where to store donations. Before you actually put them on course reserve. Once they're on course reserve, you'll put them wherever you put your course reserve items. But for us, we put everything in the interim. In my office, I have quite a bit of shelving that we were able to store there. I wouldn't recommend putting your donations in the open stacks. We're really trying to keep track of these books and if we're not adding them to the catalog or anything like that, we put them in the stacks, they might walk off. You'll also wanna determine who will actually add the donations to reserve once they come in. This was not me. This was actually our nighttime circulation manager. She's the one who typically adds new books to our collection, to our catalog and so on and so forth. So she was the one designated to add books to reserve. And then also you wanna determine who will notify professors that their books have been added. I'll talk a little bit more about this later on the presentation and why you wanna do that step. You also wanna create a textbook donation station. So a place where students can actually drop off their textbooks and make sure that it's visible and easy to see. For us, this is at our main circulation desk. We first come in, this is the first thing you see and we had a large purple bin, those are school colors, with a sign marking it. And then of course you wanna plan time to advertise, advertise, advertise the program. If students do not know it exists, they're not gonna donate, it's not gonna build a reserve. So make sure that you adequately plan to advertise. Part of advertising is actually getting students to want to donate and we went about listening two ways. First of all, students will never say no to the chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card. How we did it is for every book a student donated, they could fill out a ticket to be in our giveaway. And so if a student donated four books, they got to fill out four tickets. At the end of the program donation period, we pulled out four names and we gave out four gift cards. We also tried to pitch it as a Pay It Forward program. Have you benefited from your textbook? Did you learn? Was it helpful? Would you like to make it easier for someone else to learn in the future? We had one student in particular who one day I just happened to be at the desk when he was donating eight textbooks. And I said, wow, thank you so much. That's so nice of you. Why did you choose to donate? He told me that he was a scholarship recipient and his scholarship covered all this textbook cost. And he felt so grateful to have that and realized that not all students were that privileged and that he was hoping that by sharing his textbooks, others could benefit from his scholarship. So he really was paying it forward. I know, I was like, I did not cheat, but his name came out when we pulled names at the end probably because he donated so many textbooks, but he was really intrinsically motivated. And so we tried to pitch it as a Pay It Forward program. Yeah, Pay It Forward, good karma. So how does it actually work once the program's created? Well, first a student donates a textbook to the library. They bring it straight to the donation then. We then check to see if it's a required textbook for the following semester. And if it is, simply put, we just add it to course reserve. If it's not a required textbook for the following semester, we'll do one of two things. We'll maybe save it for one academic year. The reason being is if a student's donating something in spring, very good chances is that it might not be required until the following spring. The way our classes work here at Westminster are a lot of fall to fall or spring to spring. We don't have as many classes that carry over between both semesters. So we save it for one academic year to see if it might show up. And sometimes we'll just donate or recycle the textbook to some book donation programs such as Better World Books. But let me give you a better idea of how the kind of deeper look happens. So when a student donates a textbook and we're checking to see if it's a required textbook, we're really looking at a couple things. If it's the right edition. So if it's the wrong edition, we'll check to see if it's more than one edition old. We just quickly learned that if it's more than one edition old, our professors are gonna be worried about it. They don't want it in the classroom. And so if it's more than one edition old, we'll just donate it or cycle it to one of our donation programs. If it's only one edition old, however, we do check with the professor themselves. So we reach out to them by email or by phone. Let them know that we got this donation. We'd like to put it on reserve, but it's not the right edition. How do you feel about it? Sometimes the professor will disapprove for whatever reason that they already have that right. And if that's the case, we donate or recycle the textbook. But if they do approve, we're very happy to go ahead and add it to course reserve. And that happens, we also put a note on the book for students to know that their professor is okay with an older edition. So, but once you have books on reserve, you have these donations, you actually need to get the word out that course reserve exists. And we do this in a couple of ways. So first of all, we really tap into professor support. Earlier I mentioned the importance of letting professors know that we got one of their textbooks and that we've added it to reserve. When we let them know, we ask them to do a couple of things. First of all, we list the library's reserve option as an option for the textbook in their syllabus. We also ask them that if at all possible, they'd be willing to send a message to all the students registered to their course before school actually starts. The reason being is a lot of students can't actually access the syllabus or the online course from their learning system such as Canvas until the first day of the semester. And so if the professors can actually send a message out ahead of time, we're gonna catch the students who are buying their texts before class even starts. And if we wait till the first day of class, sometimes that's too late for some students. So we really rely on professor support to helping their students know that this is an option for them. We also use various forms of campus messaging to get the word out. For example, this is our library newsletter that goes up a note of our bathroom stalls. So we put a note there. You can see it on the bottom there. We also send out an email to our undergraduate and graduate list, letting them know what's on course reserve and as well as all the other campus messaging tools that we have here on campus. We tap into them all, hoping that the word might get out. We also post on our library social media pages. So this is our Twitter and Facebook pages. We have a humble following, but it's a strong following. And we know that if one student is excited about it, there's a high likelihood that they'll share it with their friends. So we try the best we can to get the word out because if students are donating their books, but people don't even know course reserve exists, we're really just collecting books for nothing. So this is what students will see when they look up our list. If you wanna go and check it out yourself as well, this is our fall 2019 list. You can see the Bitly link right here in the bottom right corner. But we share the Bitly link all over all their pages because it's easy for them to access. This is really just a Google sheet. And you can see that they can search by course so they can just find the course they're in by professors, by book title, so on and so forth. And over here on the right, we have a note if there's any note from the professor. So for example, with this Biology 103 textbook, we actually only had the eighth edition when the ninth edition was what required for the course, but the professors gave their approval. And so we just made note of it here so the students know they don't need to worry about having an old edition there. You'll also notice this large yellow note here at the top. And this is really because this list is like constantly getting updated. And if students check on the first day of classes, the odds are that professors are also still adding books to course reserve. So we just want them to know that they can check throughout the first couple of weeks of school to see if one of their books will get donated. We're trying to get professors to add sooner and I'll talk about that a little bit as well, but we're just leaving a few notes for students so they can know what's going on. So that's one way students can see what's available on course reserves. We also have a link to course reserves on our library homepage. Students can click the little course reserves tab and then they can either search by instructor or key words. So if they do know the title of their book or if they don't want to do any of that, they can simply click the search button here, which will take them to our catalog. It's organized a little bit differently, though it's perhaps a little bit cleaner instead of having course name, it just says name and they can see their courses here, professors over here, but they can actually see the title of the book until they click in. However, if they were to click into something, for example, this Biology 204 book, it's gonna give you a little bit more information that students might be interested in. For example, it will give you the current status of the book. The reasons why students might be interested in the status is with course reserves, we have limited checkout periods and students can check out the book anywhere between two hours and seven days, just depending on the book. The majority of our books are checked out on four-hour periods, however, and if multiple students are using the book, you wanna know if you're gonna have to walk up to the desk for nothing or if it's actually available. So it's nice to check the library catalog to see what's available there. But there's multiple ways for students to see what's on reserve and to find the materials for their course. Once you have all this up and running, but this is, by this point, you should be well into the middle of the semester, not having to do much, but towards the end, you really wanna start collecting usage data to get an idea of how your program is actually saving students money. For us, we run usage reports using our integrated library system. For us, that's COHA and we run two reports. First of all, we wanna check the number of checkouts per textbook within a certain timeframe. So for us, that's just the first day of the semester and the last day of the semester. And then also the number of unique borrowers per textbook within the same timeframe. If you can identify the number of unique borrowers, you can actually calculate down to the penny how much money you're saving students. I also wanna make a note that you should make sure to run all your reports before you remove any textbooks from course reserve. If any of you familiar with course reserve, constantly putting things up, taking them down, and if you remove it, it's gonna complicate your data or you might be missing data altogether. So I wanna give you an idea of the impact it actually made here at Westminster after our first semester. So as I stated before, our first semester was spring 2019 and everything that was donated for spring 2019 was looking to be used for this past fall 2019. So after our first attempt, we got 116 textbooks donated to the program and for our small school we were filling and for our first attempt, we felt pretty good about that number. However, only 31 of those textbooks were actually required course material for the following fall and were added to reserve. The rest were put in storage in my office to see if they'd work out for the following spring. But we also had an additional 92 textbooks placed on reserve by faculty for a total of 103 textbooks on reserve for fall 2018. While these numbers might seem low, for us it was a huge increase. The previous semester, we only had 54 books on reserve. So I think that even though 31 of the textbooks came from donations and the majority came from faculty, I think the textbook donation program also brought more awareness to reserve for our faculty who noticeably placed more on reserve for fall. It's also important to note that this excludes all videos put on reserve. We have a film of minor here on campus and they are regularly putting films on reserve for students to check out. Those students are never even expected to buy the film. So we excluded it from the information as it's just a little bit different. But ultimately of the 123 books on reserve, we were sad to find out that only 44 of them were checked out at least once. Not the best numbers, but it is a humble start. But of those 144, we had 104 unique borrowers or students who utilize reserve during the fall 2019 semester. So what does this actually mean cost savings wise? Well, we decided to calculate the number of unique users for the textbook, high average and low cost of the textbook. What this did was help us get an idea of how much students were actually able to save. And there is a range just depending on if students were potentially able to get it at the lowest price or the highest price if they didn't get at the bookstore. But if students could only get the textbook at the highest price, we saved those 104 students combined at nearly $13,000, the average around 10, and at the low average around $7,000. Again, slow start, but when you look at it at an individual level, it actually is making a pretty big difference for these individual students. So students who utilize course reserve those 104 save on average of $69 to $134 per book. Again, that's just because of the high, low and average costs. But 63 of those 104 students save more than the low average of $69. 44 students saved more than $100, 20 of them saved more than 200, and 17 saved $338.25 from China. We're checking out just one book from course reserve. So this is about an equal amount of one class. That's a pretty average class size first here. And so if you look at it that way, we had one class because it was really all the same textbook that saved $5,000, $5,700 really, from just for just one class. So even though the numbers weren't as big as we were hoping they would be, we can recognize the potential. And if we are saving, if we could potentially be saving $5,000 for every class, you can imagine the savings that are possible. And those amounts may seem small, but to a student who's struggling, that's the difference. Absolutely. That being said, we are trying to look for ways to improve checkout data and just course reserve use in general. And so first of all, we're hoping to bring professors in earlier. So right now the donations happen well enough before the end of the semester that we have enough time to promote the donations that get added to reserve. But a lot of our professors don't actually add their books to course reserve until the first week of class. And as noted earlier, if you wait till the first week of class, a lot of students have actually already bought their books by that point. So we're actually this following semester we're gonna send the notice to professors to add books to course reserve a whole month before the semester starts. In the past, we've only done a week before the semester starts, but we're gonna put multiple reminders much earlier to hopefully be getting them to add it to reserve sooner so we can actually make a difference for the students. Again, professors are a big motivator for students even knowing that course reserve exists. So also if we can bring them in earlier, they'll probably promote to their students sooner as well. We're also considering extending our checkout links. I mentioned previously that we spend, the average textbook has about a four hour checkout period, but if we can extend that, that might make students more motivated to use it. If they're worried that they have a lot of competition or four hours isn't enough, if we extend it to eight hours or even 24, we might see some more use. Based off of our data, we think that with certain textbooks, we'd be able to do that. Obviously not all we could, but also for some of the textbooks that got checked out the most, we actually have multiple copies as well. So we could also consider buying more copies to improve checkout. We also need to increase our marketing efforts. I felt like we were already doing a lot, but we can always do better. For example, for some of our classes where the textbook is extremely expensive when we have it on reserve, we might consider coming in on the first day of class to their actual classroom and just spending one, two minutes and make an announcement, you guys don't have to buy the textbook for this class. Here's an option for you. Also letting those students know that we have things like a high speed scanner if they don't have enough time to finish while they have their checkout period, they can scan the rest of the chapter and finish it from home. So we are trying to figure out some ways that we might increase our marketing efforts to better get the word out and also make students more interested in using reserve. We're also trying to be patient. This was really our first semester making a larger push for reserve. And with all things, they take time to grow. So giving ourselves some grace and letting ourselves know it could get better. I also wanna identify some potential barriers that you might face when you are trying to implement a textbook donation program of your own. First and foremost, the biggest barrier that libraries face is agreements with their campus bookstores. A lot of bookstore contracts explicitly state that they cannot have direct competition with the library and they feel that the library adding copies to course reserves themselves is direct competition. That was a previous understanding that we had on campus and we knew that professors could put their copies on reserve but we as a library could not actively seek ways to build up our reserve beyond the professor donations. And this is common for with a lot of campuses. So before you ever start, make sure you check with the agreement of your campus bookstore and make sure that you have the green light there. You also might face some resistance from library personnel. I was really fortunate to not be met with any of that but potentially some issues such as funding, how are we gonna incentivize this prize? You might not have any incentives for your students personnel time. The time it takes to monitor the donations, to find which books are needed on course reserve, to add them to course reserve, to let professors know. It is actually pretty timely, time consuming. And quite frankly, your library might not have the personnel time that you would hope to do something like that. Also space, as I mentioned before, if you don't have somewhere that's not open stacks to store it, you might have some issues there. And those are some ways that your library personnel might show some resistance. You also might see some resistance from students asking like, what's in it for me? Thinking that they'd just rather resell their textbooks. They can get sometimes more cash. Well, definitely more cash. You're not guaranteed a $25 Amazon gift card. So maybe they're more motivated that way. Or some students simply just prefer to keep their textbooks other to refer to in their future career, whatever it might be. But we did see some resistance from students. That being said, we did also get quite a few donations. Despite there being barriers, there are a lot of benefits that come from having the textbook donation program. First and foremost, it reduces the cost of education for our students. That's the biggest motivator in why we created this program. And without a doubt, it was the biggest benefit as well. For those students that we saved 300 bucks from just 10 in textbooks, that was huge. There's also low risk high reward. We had no idea if students would actually donate textbooks. But if they didn't, we was no harm lost. We wouldn't have lost anything, except for maybe a little bit of time. But if students did donate, there was a huge potential for it to impact students. So even though only 31 textbooks actually got put on reserve, we only had to spend $100 to incentivize students for the Amazon giveaways. But if we were to buy all 31 of those textbooks on our own, we've had to spend several thousand dollars. So pretty low risk and a high reward. There's also low to no cost for libraries, as I just mentioned. And it allows students to give back and pay it forward. I know for that one student who donated eight, it made him feel really good to actually see other students using it later on. And it gave him a sense of accomplishment. And of course, it built up course reserve. The bigger course reserve is, the more students will think to use it in the future. And it promotes the library. Anytime the students come into the library for the first time, that gives us an opportunity to hook up. And for some students, they may not come until they heard about course reserve. So anything we can do to create goodwill between us and the students, we're pretty happy about. And I think the textbook donation program is a great way to get there. That brings me to the end of the presentation. I always am a quick talker. So I apologize if I talk too fast. But is there any questions? Let's see. All right, anybody, if you have any questions, nothing was typed in while you were talking, but that's okay. If anybody has any questions or comments or thoughts or suggestions for Erin about our presentation, type into the questions section. And I will ask them. I do have one. You mentioned potential barriers. And you mentioned the college bookstore having conflict. Do publishers care that they will not be getting the income from students buying the books? Yeah, so actually our agreement, our bookstores agreement actually comes via the publisher. So they're kind of go hand in hand. And so since the agreement is then navigated by the bookstore and the publishers. And so they're the middle ground between us and the publishers. And since we have the okay from the bookstore, we could assume that we were okay with the publisher ended as well. And it's very similar to like if a student themselves was just to buy the textbook and then share it with all their friends or resell it. Once someone initially has the textbook, they have the right to do what they will. What they want with it, correct? Right? All right, we do have questions coming in. Question one to know, this is from one of our colleges. How do you set the checkout period? How did you decide what they were going to be? I know you had quite a range of four hours to exit seven days as the longest. Right, so two hours to seven days, that was a previously existing, that's just like always the options that we've had for professors. So when professors could come in, they would give us their preference. So we just decided that for the non-professor added course reserve that we would go ahead and do four hours. That was just the average of our previous experience of what professors wanted from students. So when we let professors know, we said, hey, we're making it, we're gonna make it a four hour checkout period, if you have any concerns or would like it, otherwise just let us know and then we would change it. But four hours is our, it was just our default based off of like previous data. And we also wanna make sure that if multiple students are using the textbook that they can still get it within the same day, which is why we chose four over, because our options go two hours, four hours, eight hours, 24, and then it goes day by day up until seven days. And so the difference between four and eight seemed quite a bit, but two seemed too short. So we settled with four. Yeah. So a little bit based on what the students might need from your knowledge and professors saying, I know they're only gonna need it for this amount of time or they're definitely gonna need it for a longer time because of what I'm making them do. Exactly. And we are thinking, like I mentioned, upping it to 24 hours to see if that's gonna increase it. Our only apprehension is into bumping it to 24 hours is like I mentioned before, if another student needs it and they have class coming up, 24 hours could be actually quite a long period. I think that's another reason though why students don't use Course Reserve. They're worried about the competition for the textbook. But we do also have multiple books on reserve that we have multiple copies of. For example, we have a geology book that we have four copies. And I think since students know there's four copies, that's one of our higher checked out books. So would all four of those have the same period or could some be like two out of the four hours and some be multiple days? Yeah, that's actually a great question. With the multiple copies, we do actually have different checkout periods. So we have a four hour, a 24 hour. Well, I think we have one four hour and then everything else is 24 hours. So that way there's always one that will be guaranteed to come back within the day but there's others that students can take home with them, take the class, those types of things. Oh, okay, great question. That's good. Got a few more comments coming in. Anybody have any questions you wanna ask of Erin? Give them a now. There is her email address right there as well on her final slide there at the bottom. You can always reach out to her later if you don't get your question in or answered right now. See, we do have comments saying great program for college students. Wish it was available when I was in college. I agree. I did a lot of buying news, sharing, selling it all back and hope I get something. The selling back to the bookstore is, I don't know, in my experience, 99% of the time just not worth a couple of dollars. I would have preferred this kind of a program that I could then pass it on to somebody else rather than, yeah. Exactly, and that's kind of how we tried to sell it. I know when I was in college I'd buy a $200 textbook and then take it back to the bookstore and get 15 bucks for it. And that just like made me mad. And so I think there's other students who like that to just have this anger towards the bookstore and try to see it benefit another student. Absolutely. Oh, good question. Are these reserves allowed to leave the library? Do you allow the four hour checkout books to leave the library? Are there any in library only? Yeah, so for anything that's less than 24 hours is technically in in-house use only. We have seen students walk out with them. We have never had a student permanently take the book though. A lot of the times the students might even mention, hey, I just really need to take this to class with me. I'm gonna bring it back. We've been pretty lax with that because we haven't had any issues of students like permanently taking the textbook. And it's really just in desperation that they've left the library and we're just trying to help them, not hurt them. So in those cases we kind of just turned the other way. But for anything less than 24 hours they are technically supposed to stay in the library. Okay. Well, and on another comment, it's quite wonderful to make this gift to the needy students that you have, definitely. Thank you. We hope it grows and that more students will use it in the future. Okay, because I've heard of textbook rental programs before but I have not come across this kind of a donation. And I know some, this kind of a, and I've heard of the libraries sometimes of providing the textbooks I'm reserved that they've either gotten themselves, purchased themselves for the different classes or that the professor has provided for the different classes. And I know that's always sometimes been contentious. I don't know why but the actual donating it to them to the program, that is something I had not heard of before. Well, for us, like the previous semester we identified several courses that have textbooks that are regularly listed. And I knew that from tracking textbook data over semesters. So we purchased several, but we, for like 500 bucks we're only able to buy like three textbooks. And so we just thought, you know what, let's just try the donation program, see what we get. And so for $100, we got six times the amount of books that actually ended up on reserve. But I also think I should have noted that when you were talking about students selling the textbooks back to the bookstore. I think part of the reason why we got a lot of textbooks that were not available weren't needed in future semesters is because the bookstore wouldn't buy them back. And so when the students wouldn't buy them back we almost became like a dumping ground for books that weren't wanted. So that's one thing to watch for. We might change it in the future. We don't know, we're still in the investigation stage of whether or not this is worth it. But it's been a good experiment so far. Yeah, that is hard. And sometimes the bookstore, sometimes they know, yes, this book will be used in a future semester. Like the ones you said, it's every spring semester it's used. So we will be able to sell this in another year. Sometimes they don't know either. And do they want to take the risk of buying it? Yeah, and we actually also got a lot of really good, just like humanities books, like popular literature that maybe was only used in one semester but that we're gonna go ahead and add to our permanent collection. So we're also building up our collection in ways that we didn't necessarily expect, but it's been good. Those are eternally useful. Yeah, some of those, yeah. For some of the ones where you call this, some of the students may be using it as a dumping ground, that sounds terrible. But I wonder for the books that they don't want to keep themselves, they can't get any money back for, that's worth it. The library may have better resources for recycling of the books. Like the books, because you guys are always having to, you're always weeding things and having to get rid of large batches of books. An individual with a couple of textbooks, I don't necessarily know where to officially recycle my hardcover textbook, but the library's got experience in that, that may be just, that's okay. Absolutely, and we have a very eco-conscious student population, they're very concerned about that type of thing. And so for a lot of them, and we're up front when we advertise the textbook donation program, it's not guaranteed it will be at Course Reserve, but if we can't add it and we can't add it to our typical, our normal collections, we will make sure that it appropriately gets recycled or donated. And that was enough for some students. Awesome, it's not just gonna go in the trash. All right. All right, anybody have any desperate last minute questions they want to ask Avera? And give me a couple of seconds to do that. Thanks for sticking around. Yeah, for presenting with it, being here with us, Avera. We still had a good group at the end here. Definitely will always do our West Coast people. Hi, happy to see you on with us today. But it doesn't look like anybody's typing anything in. So I think we will wrap up your session. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna pull back control to my screen again. There we are. All right, everyone. Okay, so that was our last session of the day. That wraps it up for Big Top of Small Libraries 2020. Yay, we made it through.