 Hello, I'm Kate Shelberg, librarian at Kirkwood Community College. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate a database called Faculty Select that helps faculty identify free textbook alternatives for adoption in their courses. We'll begin with a brief introduction to OER and to other materials that are free to access. The initial attraction of these textbook alternatives is in fact that they're free to access online. This is especially important when considering the high cost of traditional textbooks and the uneven effect those prices have on low-income students who often struggle to afford the many costs of attending college. Even a glance at these statistics makes it clear that the current status of traditional textbook publishing creates a very real barrier to success for many students. One of the top benefits of free textbooks cited by faculty adopters is that all registered students can access the text online from the first day of class. The free materials included in the Faculty Select database include two distinct categories OER or Open Educational Resources and DRM-free eBooks. Before we search, it's important to understand what these two terms mean. OER are educational materials licensed by the author or creator to specifically grant users the right to copy and adapt their materials with attribution to the original author. This open licensing is what allows materials to be posted online copied and printed with no licensing fees. There is a lot more I could say about the benefits of OER to students and faculty but for the purposes of this video I will leave it there. You can read much more about OER at www.kerquod.edu slash OER. DRM-free eBooks are also free for students to access but are otherwise very different from OER in how they can be used. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it is an approach to copyright protection for digital works that prevents downloading copying and printing by the user. So DRM-free eBooks are still under copyright but the user is not technologically prevented from downloading or printing a copy and can also retain that copy after the class is complete. For those DRM-free eBook titles requested by Kirkwood faculty for use as textbook alternatives, they are purchased one time by the college and are then accessible by an unlimited number of Kirkwood students. So these titles aren't completely free but are free for students to access. Another important difference to note, because these books are copyrighted they are not available for adapting or remixing as OER might be. So let's get searching. The link to faculty select is not on the library website with the other databases. It's a special kind of link that has to be behind a login so it shows up for faculty when you log in to Talon. It's there along with the other faculty tools and links. You can bookmark the URL for future access if you like. The faculty select database is an EBSCO host product so the search interface is familiar to many of us. Remember that this is searching book records so you want to start out with a pretty broad subject search. You might try the name of the course, your discipline, or the program you're teaching. For example a search of developmental psychology retrieves 849 results. You might browse through these or you might add another keyword or use some limiters. Notice that you have some familiar limiters along the left side of the page like publication date and subject. And you also have limiters specific to this database OER only and ebooks available for purchase. These refer to the two categories of materials that are searchable through faculty select OER and DRM free ebooks. Because OER are more flexible in how they can be used we recommend you begin by limiting your search to OER to see if there is an open license text that meets your needs. If you locate an OER text that you want to preview click on the title and you will have the option to view the text in its repository. In this example I click on the button preview or adopt this open ebook and it sends me through to the text. Many of the OER texts indexed in faculty select contain faculty reviews once you get to their repository. You may also find that there are supplemental materials or different formats available. If you have any questions at this point about the licensing and about how to post materials to Talon please contact the library for assistance. If you decide to adopt an OER text it is helpful to the library if you return to the faculty select window and complete the adoption form. It helps us by letting us know that the database has been useful to our faculty and we can then also keep track of how many faculty have adopted OER and for which courses. Let's go back to the faculty select search now and this time i'll select ebooks available for purchase and we'll also slide the date limit up so i'm only looking at more recently published titles. I'm interested in this title here so i'll click on it to get more information. I get to this record page which doesn't give me a lot more information so i'm going to want to click on the preview this ebook link over on the left side of the page. The preview brings up an ebook viewer very similar to the ebsco host ebooks viewer but without the ability to search print or save because it is in preview mode but you can click through the whole book to see if it will serve your purpose. If you decide this is a book you would like to use as a textbook alternative close the preview window and return to the record. This time click on request a purchase of this item from your library. Pretty self-explanatory there the link takes you to a form which will go directly to the library and lets us know exactly which book you want. Thank you for checking out faculty select and let us know if you have any questions about this database or about adopting OER for your courses.