[Wactclc-alma] Online textbooks & reserves during COVID-19

[Thomas, Kirsti]

In just the past 2 days, a bunch of publishers have been announcing that they'll be *temporarily* making a bunch of textbooks and ebooks available online for free.

Our Reserves folks are using Alma Analytics to report on our most heavily-used reserves, and then checking publisher websites to find out if students can get those textbooks for free online.  Maggie Argiro (Circ Manager at South) says many of our textbooks are now available via a publisher platform called RedShelf.
https://studentresponse.redshelf.com/

McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Cengage are other textbook publishers that we know are making some textbooks temporarily available for free.

As we find these, we're saving direct links into a shared spreadsheet.

We plan to share some of these links with instructors directly.  We're also considering adding ultra-brief bib records and portfolios for these temporarily-free online textbooks to Alma where we can (and deleting them after all this is over).  We'll be working on this more next week and I can share what we come up with to this list if it would be helpful. 

It will be ok!

Kirsti S. Thomas
Library Technical Service Manager
Seattle Colleges
kirsti.thomas at seattlecolleges.edu