E-Books and a Distance Education Program: A Library’s Failure Rate in Supplying Course Readings for One Program
When Purdue University’s College of Education decided to offer its first fully online master’s program in Learning Design and Technology, the education librarian volunteered to find and organize all the course readings by creating a LibGuide web page with links to the readings for each course. This paper analyzes these course readings, delivered to distance education students through links to the library’s electronic holdings, between January 2012 and June 2014. It categorizes the readings as journal articles, books (or chapters in books), and other openly available scholarly resources on the web. Since this book is primarily about e-books, the analysis focuses on chapters and books used for these courses. Approximately half the required readings are journal articles, about one third are books or book chapters, and about one fifth are freely available reports or web pages. The journal articles are readily available via library subscriptions; however, approximately 60% of the books needed are not available in electronic format for purchase at any price. The analysis concludes that the library cannot meet the e-book demand for distance education students because many of the required books are not available for library purchase in digital format.
