Another day, another instructor telling library staff to make arrangements with the publisher about getting an electronic version of their textbook. Faculty, why do you not believe library staff? Why do you assume that we're not doing *absolutely everything* we can to help?

Listen faculty pals, no one from the library is gonna tell you what materials to choose or force you to go a particular route. That's your own choice, allowed for under academic freedom, domain knowledge, and positionality as an instructor.

What we WILL tell you about are your options. Because we are helpful like that! We're also going to tell you that a) the majority of students don't buy textbooks and other course materials, b) textbook publishers DO NOT play well with libraries, and c) access codes are bad.

If you choose to continue using a $300 textbook, that's your perogative. But do NOT give the library staff shit when your students aren't prepared for lectures or perform poorly on assessments because they LEGITIMATELY COULD NOT ACCESS WHAT THEY NEEDED TO SUCCEED.

If you're teaching in the fall + you're frustrated that there's no electronic access to a text, perhaps instead of making the lives of library staff harder, you could direct your ire to publishers? THEY created this system + they're the ones who can change it. OR JUST USE #OER.

I know this is work. I know switching things up will be easier for some courses than others. But you aren't alone! Academic libraries and teaching support centres can help with that (again, because we are awesome)!

We can help you find openly licensed content that you can adapt/customize. We can help you navigate fair dealing exceptions so that you can use portions of traditional commercial textbooks. We can help you find content that we can licensed through the library to suit your needs.

But you need to respect that expertise and that work! Your time is important, but so is ours. You need to respect that we are doing the best operating in the systems we have with the time that we have. Just like you are. //FIN

An addendum (because this tweet is getting some traction): a team of us at MPOW has written a news item that talks about a lot of these issues / alternatives in more detail. Feel free to pass it along to faculty who don't get it or make your own version: https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/news/commercial-textbooks-present-challenges-virtual-environment