Reserves: Reserves

• Books or audiovisual materials owned by a faculty member, and audiovisual materials owned by the Library.
• Library materials from the collection may be placed on reserve, except low valued textbooks housed in the Course Book Collection which have an in-library use restriction. Exceptions are made for textbooks with high price tags

• Items borrowed from other libraries.
• Most materials utilized in sequential semesters.

The Library will place materials on reserve for your class with a 48 hour notice.. Before the course begins  provide the following information on a "Reserves Form" available at the library circulation desk requesting: 

• Instructor's name and contact information
• Course Name
• Course Number
• Semester(s)

Please fill out a separate Reserves Form for each course. An itemized list of materials is optional.

The Library reserves the right to decide how many copies of an item or how many items can be placed on reserve, based on the number of students in a class, expected use, the library's past experience with reserves, and space available.

The Library is not responsible for materials that are lost, stolen or damaged. When possible, the Circulation Coordinator will contact the faculty member to report the problem and seek a solution. Materials are charged out to students by scanning their barcoded Cougar cards.

The Library does not reproduce materials for reserve.

The Library is not responsible for any violation of copyright or copying by the faculty member or persons using the Reserve materials. See the Copyright guide for more.

Textbook purchases policy: The Library does not purchase textbooks.

Clarification:  It has been a few years since the library has had a program of buying all textbooks. The practice was reviewed and revised after a review demonstrated that such a complete coverage policy would utilize over half of our book budget, leaving far too little for the purchase of other exploratory materials. 

As of this moment, about 1/3^rd of all textbooks have current editions in our Course Books collection. Another 1/3^rd have earlier editions. Therefore, In these difficult financial times, very few libraries maintain any type of textbook collection, choosing to utilize their funds for supplementary materials. This is a philosophical issue we may revisit in our advisory Councils.

In the meantime, as we are seeking to find a reasonable balance of curriculum and research support materials, we simply cannot subsidize all required textbooks.  In order to find a sensitive solution, we will address any special request on a case-by-case basis, using criteria such as:

• Is this a book that is so important that it should be part of a core personal collection?
• How expensive is the item?
• How many students will benefit from the purchase?
• Are there special considerations that we must address?
• Are there electronic portions that libraries cannot purchase … in which case students often must already buy the package which includes the paper book?

Please feel free to respond directly to the library about these issues … all comments will be forwarded to the appropriate stakeholder Councils for consideration.