FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
BOCA RATON, FLA. (October 23, 2018) —The Florida Atlantic University Libraries have recently negotiated access to more than 170,000 digital textbook materials for students and faculty to use.
In an effort to align with the university’s commitment to minimizing the cost of required or recommended textbooks or instructional materials to students, the libraries used a $75,000 technology fee award for ProQuest Ebook Central Platform.
The ProQuest platform gives students access to thousands of e-books from scholarly publishers and university presses that professors can set as supplementary course materials or even required textbooks. The digital material can also be used by the FAU community for research.
“The Libraries are committed to finding ways to reduce the cost of course materials for FAU students,” said Carol Hixson, Dean of the University Libraries. “This electronic collection is intended to increase the options that faculty have available to them to select quality course materials that will not cost students any extra money.”
Now students and faculty can browse ProQuest’s materials by conducting a simple catalog search or looking for ProQuest Ebook Central under the “P” section of our A-Z database list.
The appealing part of this ProQuest access model is that we only purchase the books that students and faculty are perusing. So, if a person has looked at the book for a specific number of minutes, viewed pages in the book, or printed pages from the book, it will in most cases trigger an official purchase. Once the material is bought, we will have perpetual access.
The FAU Libraries feel the ProQuest Ebook Central Platform is a great resource because it can help us play an important role in textbook affordability. By purchasing electronic texts that faculty can adopt for their courses, students then can use the texts free of charge.
